MCLC: College admissions bribery

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College admissions bribery
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (12/4/15)
Bribery Confession in China Calls Into Question Integrity of College Admissions
By Michael Forsythe
HONG KONG — The children of the wealthy and well-connected in China enjoy enormous educational advantages, gaining access to elite kindergartens, primary schools and tutors beyond the reach of most Chinese families. But strict meritocracy was thought to reign at one crucial stage: college admission. To gain a spot in a top Chinese university and a ticket to a prosperous life afterward, a student needed a high score on the country’s famously difficult national college entrance examination, not a father with a thick wallet.
Or so most people thought until Thursday, when a confession to bribery by Cai Rongsheng, the former admissions director for Renmin University, called the integrity of the system into question. Mr. Cai, 50, acknowledged to a court in Nanjing, where he is on trial, that he had accepted more than $3.6 million in illegal payments between 2005 to 2013, in exchange for helping 44 students obtain spots at Renmin, a prestigious school in Beijing, or to allow students already there to change their majors, the website of the state-run China News Service reported. Among the wealthy students who benefited was the daughter of a Hong Kong businessman, China News Service reported on Thursday.
No verdict has been announced in Mr. Cai’s case. He was first arrested in late 2013 as he was trying to flee to Canada with a fake passport, according to news reports at the time.
Beyond that, Ji Baocheng, who was president of Renmin University when Mr. Cai worked there, had his Communist Party membership suspended for two years in July, according to China Daily, a state-run newspaper. The paper said that Mr. Ji was suspected of “improper behavior relating to university enrollment” after Mr. Cai was arrested.
President Xi Jinping has been mounting a campaign against corruption in China for more than three years, with higher education as one of the focal points, but many of the cases that have surfaced so far have involved misuse of public funds rather than bribery. Eight officials from the Communication University of China, including its top two officials, were punished in November for violating the school’s austerity code; they were said to have driven luxury cars, held banquets with university funds and sent the university’s finances into “chaos.” Officials at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications were found to have made false expense reports.
The ruling Communist Party’s antigraft agency has singled out 32 people working in higher education for investigations this year, Xinhua reported last month. Yuan Guiren, China’s outspoken education minister, who has railed against the use of Western textbooks in China’s classrooms, was cited in The Beijing News this week as saying that corruption would not be tolerated in the education system.
David Moser, who has been teaching in Beijing universities for two decades and is the academic director of a Chinese-language program at Capital Normal University, said some otherwise necessary changes to the admission system may also have opened the way for corruption.
Until fairly recently, the only criterion for admission was a student’s score on the gaokao, the college admissions test administered to millions every summer. But that tended to produce student bodies that lacked diversity and to reward rote learning over creativity and talent, Mr. Moser said in a telephone interview.
Over the past decade, new policies gave some universities permission to consider other factors, including musical ability, athletic prowess or skills at foreign languages, in selecting students. But by allowing admissions officers to use their own judgment, Mr. Moser said, the new policies gave them influence they could barter.
“The attempt was a good one, which was to try to get a different variety of students that maybe deserved to be in the college environment who didn’t excel at passing tests,” Mr. Moser said. “Instead of doing what they hoped it would, which is to attract a more broad and varied group of students, it actually just opened up another little arena for corruption.”
Well-to-do Chinese families have another alternative: Many now bypass the Chinese university system, sending their children to the United States or other countries for college.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 7, 2015
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