A delegation of Chinese education officials zoomed around Metropolitan State College in golf carts this week, clicking pictures of something not found in China – a campus full of nonelite students.
The 11 officials from China’s Ministry of Education were interested in Metro State’s open-admissions policy, which automatically accepts anyone 20 and older with a high school diploma.
The policy is a stark contrast to higher-education policy in China, where only those with the highest marks on a national exam attend college.
China, where just 8 percent of college-age students were going to college in 1998, has been working for the past decade to expand the pool of college graduates.
Now, about 21 percent of college-age students are enrolling, compared with about 35 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States.
“Although China has a very long history, in terms of higher education, it’s still at its very infant stage,” Zhao Weishan, deputy director general of the Education Department, said through a translator. “China is actively engaging in economic development in order to uplift the living standard of the people.”
The delegates, who also plan to visit colleges in Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and California, want to learn more about using education to drive the economy, Metro State president Stephen Jordan said.
“They want to see how we deal with the nonelite population,” said Jordan, who drove one of the golf carts on the campus tour. “What they’re trying to do is create a new middle class.”
The Chinese government is concentrating much of its effort on the western half of its country, which has a large population of low-income and minority people who aren’t going to college.
China has called for increasing the percentage of students going to college by 5 percent per year – about 700,000 to 900,000 students, according to a report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in California.
China, which is highly focused on science and engineering, wants to diversify the kinds of degrees students are receiving, Weishan said.
In the United States, about one-third of bachelor’s degrees were in science and engineering in the past three decades. In China, science and engineering degrees have made up more than half of the bachelor’s degrees.
Americans, Weishan said, could learn from China’s primary and secondary education system. He called the millions of dollars spent in the U.S. each year teaching remedial courses to college students “a big waste of resources.”
The Chinese delegates attended sessions on curriculum and economic development, and sat down with Metro State administrators to set up faculty- and student-exchange opportunities.
Before their arrival, anthropology professor Ken Keller offered a crash course in cultural awareness. He recommended that Metro State hosts serve hot tea at every meal, allow for plenty of smoke breaks and expect a quiet audience, not a peppering of questions.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
