Studying abroad

Nobody has capitalized on China's national obsession with studying abroad and learning English as much as Yu Minhong, also known as Michael Yu.

Nicknamed "the Godfather of studying abroad," Yu is the founder of the New Oriental School, the country's largest private language school, and plans to build a private university.

The 46-year-old Yu, as president and 31.18 percent shareholder of the NASDAQ-listed New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc, is by far the richest teacher in China. He ranked 103rd on the 2008 Hurun Rich List, worth about 6 billion yuan.

New Oriental trades on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol "EDU".

The group had a $118.3 million net revenue and a $44.9 million net profit in the first quarter of the 2009 fiscal year.

Commercial success, though, is not Yu's ultimate ambition.

"My biggest dream is to start a genuine non-profit private university in China," he tells the 21st Century Business Herald. "Most of the university's students will be from impoverished, rural areas and will pay nominal tuition for first-rate higher education."

Raising the money to get the project up and running will take at least 10 years, says Yu.

Yu started the New Oriental, which teaches English, other foreign languages and prepares students for major tests required for admission into foreign universities, in 1993, with just 30 students. Now it has branches in 38 Chinese cities and one in Toronto, Canada.

After the State Council, China's cabinet, allowed people to study abroad at their own expense in 1981, the number of Chinese students studying overseas quickly rose. According to People's Daily more than 1,000 students went abroad in 1983. The figure soared to over 100,000 in 1987. Last year it was more than 150,000.

The biggest hurdling facing such students is passing the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

Yu sensed an opportunity, quit his post as an English teacher at Peking University in 1991 and began teaching students how to pass TOEFL and GRE.

His humorous teaching style, mixing a heavy learning load with a lot of jokes, built a reputation among students, and Yu makes sure his teachers follow his example.

But the school hasn't been problem-free. The United States Educational Testing Service (ETS) sued New Oriental for illegally copying, publishing and selling ETS exam questions in 2001 and the Higher People's Court of Beijing ruled in 2005 that the school should compensate ETS 3.74 million yuan.

The school was largely unaffected by the lawsuit, though, and remains a magnet for young Chinese who dream of studying abroad.

(China Daily 12/15/2008 page7)