When good grades alone are just not enough
For most of China's education-obsessed parents, getting their children into the United States' most prestigious public university would be a grade-A honor.
But as University of California, Berkeley chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau explained during a recent trip to Beijing, Chinese aspiring to be admitted to the university would need to demonstrate talents that put them above top of their class. While China's pedagogy is notoriously fixated on standardized test scores, Birgeneau explained that just earning high marks isn't enough.
"We at Berkeley have what we call 'comprehensive admissions'; this means that scores on standardized tests are only part of the admissions criteria, and we put a large emphasis on evidence for commitment to service to society, leadership abilities and innovation," he said.
"A student who has shown evidence of real creativity will often be admitted over a student with much higher grades but who otherwise seems to be an only one-dimensional person."
Undergraduate students from China would also have to overcome the cap on the number of international students the university could accept. Per agreement with the state, 90 percent of the university's undergraduate student body must come from California, while only 4 percent come from outside the United States.
"Admission as an undergraduate to this threshold for international students, including those from the Chinese mainland, is unrealistically high," Birgeneau said.
"This is not any discrimination; this is just that the state provides funding on agreement that we will use that funding to educate taxpayers in the State of California."
However, no such cap exists at the graduate and post-graduate levels, and one-third of Berkeley's currently enrolled students working on graduate and post-graduate degrees are international.
Overall, more than 7 percent, or 2,500 students, come from outside the United States. And 60 percent of these come from Asia, with China being among the top three suppliers. Currently, 50 undergraduate and 180 graduate students from China are enrolled in the university.
In addition to accepting Chinese studying abroad, Berkeley is widely known for its vibrant on-campus Asian-American community.
"At Berkeley, more than one-fourth of our undergraduate students are ethnically Chinese - even though Chinese people are a much smaller percentage of the population of the state - and I attribute this to the value placed on education in Chinese culture, which, again, I admire very much," Birgeneau said.
He said that often, Chinese students who did not perform well at domestic universities would flourish at Berkeley.
While both countries' pedagogical systems have their respective advantages and disadvantages, he said, "outstanding graduates from Chinese universities compete very effectively with outstanding graduates from MIT, or Princeton, or from Oxford, or from the University of Munich."
(China Daily 06/07/2007 page18)
