Application tampering highlights private colleges' survival crisis

Police have nabbed two people who allegedly tampered with students' college applications to help a private college boost recruitment, following China's national college entrance exams.

The two, a man surnamed Li and a woman surnamed Zheng, were arrested on Wednesday and Thursday after secretly editing online lists created by 14 prospective college students from Zhoukou, Henan province, local media said on Friday.

The students, all from Zhoukou City Medical School, completed an entrance examination for medical college in June. They, like most other high school grads, participated in a university selection process in which they prioritized their first, second and third choices for college, with lists for vocational colleges posted online.

The 14 students discovered in early July that the top schools on their lists had all been changed to Shandong Modern Vocational College, a university that has admitted to hiring Li and Zheng as a temporary recruiter.

Li and Zheng told the police the school offered them 550 yuan ($90) per student for successfully recruiting new students.

Students and parents said the Zhoukou school posted the students' information, including names, ID numbers, exam registration numbers and passwords for filling out their online lists on a school bulletin board on June 27. Some of them saw three people in charge of SMVC recruitment, including Li and Zheng, removing sheets of paper containing the information from the board.

Officials with the Henan provincial admission office said recruitment for vocational colleges will start on Aug 2, before which time they will make a decision on the matter based on a police investigation.

Zou Jianguo, a vice-president of SMVC, said the college has assigned a vice-president to join the investigation team.

Zou said Li and Zheng, who were both students at SMVC, were privately hired by Li Zhizhen, an admissions employee at the college. It is still unknown whether Li Zhizhen was involved in the tampering.

Fewer applicants

Similar cases have happened elsewhere. Ten high school students in Sichuan province had their lists tampered with at the end of June by a local vocational college. Another two students in Henan province had their university application forms changed without their permission.

Experts believe the illegal recruitment methods have highlighted the difficulties that private colleges are encountering.

Private colleges depend mainly on tuition as a source of income. However, the number of students taking entrance exams and enrolling in college has dropped in recent years, said Liu Zhiye, deputy director of the higher education research center of Shandong University.

According to the Ministry of Education, the number of national exam test takers has fallen for four consecutive years from 10.5 million in 2008 to 9.15 million this year.

Vicious cycle

Zhang Ziyi, vice-president of the China University of Information Engineering, a private university based in Beijing, said most parents believe only students with bad academic records will "fall into" private colleges.

To attract more students, some colleges have hired administrative employees, teachers and students to engage in recruitment work.

Colleges now spend most of their funds recruiting students instead of enhancing educational facilities and faculties, forming a vicious cycle.

Zou said that if any faculty is found to have been involved in changing students' college application records, the effect on a college's future recruitment could be enormous.

According to China's National Medium- and Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-20), the government will encourage the establishment and development of private educational institutions.

The plan advocates the eradication of discrimination toward private institutions and local governments have been advised to financially support privately run colleges.

Educational authorities should give these colleges the right to set up majors, subjects and courses in accordance with demand, said Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based nonprofit educational policy research organization.

"If they want to change but are not given the space to do so, then the government should be responsible for their survival," Xiong said.