Don't waste funds on elite students

Sun Yat-Sen University is reportedly set to recruit candidates for its EMBA course. But the candidates have to be entrepreneurs with at least 5 billion yuan ($800.67 million) in assets. This seemingly golden-club class is a waste of taxpayers' money in the name of national education, says an article in Qianjiang Evening News. Excerpts:

Universities that have EMBA course are bound to set certain criteria for their candidates in terms of qualification and experience. But it's rare to see a university require its candidates to be literally billionaires.

Institutions like Sun Yat-Sen University are spending the country's education resources on wealthy elites not because the latter are badly in need of knowledge, but to train the rich to maximize their profits.

On the same campus, ordinary students are prejudiced against and get almost nothing from the national education resources. A couple of years later, these ordinary students will get their diplomas, for sure, but they will leave the college with a heavy heart and the feeling of being treated as second- or even third-class students, not in terms of knowledge but wealth.

That would go against the motto of higher education and the unifying quality of the national college entrance examination. Contrary to the philosophy of higher education, institutions like Sun Yat-Sen University could force students to consider money to be the source of real happiness.

Many Ivy League graduates from universities like Harvard and Yale have gone on to become billionaires and donate a lot of money to their alma maters, which they used to develop a healthy and positive cycle of donation and meaningful programs.

In contrast, Sun Yat-Sen University is using the State's resources to attract billionaires to the campus instead of fostering future millionaires, which runs counter to the objective of education.