Source: Sinosphere, NYT (6/30/15)
Fierce Rivalry Between China’s Top Two Universities Plays Out Online
By YIFU DONG
The entrance to Peking University in Beijing.Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
A war of words has raged on the Chinese Internet this week. It doesn’t involve celebrities or politicians. It’s a battle between China’s top two universities, Tsinghua and Peking, over recruiting new undergraduates.
Every June after the national university entrance exam, or gaokao, Chinese universities start their recruiting process: They call the students who received high scores on the exam, the students’ parents, their high school teachers and even members of their high schools’ administrative staffs. They also arrange for promising recruits to visit their campuses.
According to the Ministry of Education, 9.42 million students are vying for seven million spots in China’s undergraduate and associate degree programs beginning in the fall of this year. Traditionally, the competition between Tsinghua and Peking for the cream of the crop has been particularly fierce. A majority of students with excellent gaokao scores choose to attend one of the two schools.
This year, when the Tsinghua freshman class will number 3,372 and the Peking class 3,665, the most conspicuous battle has featured the two universities’ freshmen recruiting teams in Sichuan Province arguing on their official Weibo accounts, as initially reported by the website ifeng.
The Peking University team was the first to post its version of recent events in the province:
The other school’s recruiting team made phone calls to students who rank in the top 10 and claimed that Peking University had lied and would not let them into their desired majors. We are here to respond: First, a promise by our team is always reliable. Based on the current applications to each department and number of people, there’s no way the students’ needs cannot be satisfied. Second, from our experience in the past five years, it is the other school that has frequently breached its promises to students. Please stop bothering the to-be freshmen of Peking University.
The Tsinghua team in Sichuan responded:
Brother, it’s not a problem if you advertise Peking University so that they can make a better choice, even if you exaggerate a little. But if you decide to go beyond the policies and use money to lure the students, aren’t you afraid of exerting a bad influence over children?
The Peking University team then alluded to how it said Tsinghua had succeeded in recruiting two recent top gaokao scorers with generous scholarships:
Brother, in the past five years, you used a lot of money to buy up Tang and Guo. Do I need to bring this up? Here we reiterate that there’s no chance for anyone trying to haggle for money from us with their high scores.
The rival recruiting teams soon deleted the posts, but ifeng published screenshots of the argument, which went viral.
Later, the Peking team returned to the squabble and suggested:
1. Serve the students truthfully. Do not lie or attack others. 2. Respect students’ own choices. Do not put pressure on the students through schools and parents. Do not use younger brothers to force their older brothers, nor use girlfriends to make decisions for their boyfriends. 3. Abide by the rules, treat every student equally and object to any price demand.
Some commenters on ifeng have been hard on the two schools. An observation with more than 3,600 likes from a user in Fujian says: “With this kind of education, does our nation have any hope? Everything is for vanity. Famous universities are vain, famous professors are vain, and the students, too, are vain. The common people are even worse.”
For Tsinghua and Peking, the goal is to recruit as many zhuangyuan, the very top gaokao scorers from each province, as possible and to set the cutoff scores, below which applicants won’t be considered, as high as possible. According to a widely reposted commentary on Haiwai Net, the website of the overseas edition of the newspaper People’s Daily, the more top scorers a university lures and the higher the cutoff scores it sets in each province, the more prestige it gains.
As for the effect of recruiting the top scorers, Shangguan Caiwei, the author of the commentary, offers an obvious example: “If the news says, ‘This year, the zhuangyuan from every province are attending Peking University,’ then everyone will believe that Peking University is the best university in the country. The same happens if it’s Tsinghua.”
Compared with recruiting top scorers, setting a high cutoff score is a trickier business. Ms. Shangguan points out that some students do not rank in the top 10 in their provinces, but they still manage to be accepted to study at prestigious schools like Tsinghua or Peking. “It’s not because of their family background,” she said. “It’s because they determine the cutoff scores of the university in the province.” In other words, every university has a quota in each province, so the goal is to fulfill the recruitment quota with a higher cutoff score than your competitors’. So although some students do not seem like hot commodities, their scores are perfect for elevating the cutoff scores.
“If these students are taken by the competitors, then you’ll be forced to lower your own cutoff score” to fulfill the quota, Ms. Shangguan said. “Once your cutoff score is lower than those of your competitors, you lose half of the battle of recruitment. This is what we call ‘a few points determine the difference between heaven and earth.’ ”
Ms. Shangguan also lends credence to several seemingly apocryphal stories online: It is true, she writes, that a few Tsinghua and Peking recruiters traded blows and inflicted injuries on one another and that Tsinghua invited new recruits to campus and cut off their contact to the outside world to make sure that the students selected Tsinghua. It is also true, she writes, that during the final three hours for applications to be accepted, Tsinghua recruiters pretending to be students called all the phones at Peking University’s recruitment center in an unnamed province so that the lines were busy when real students tried to get through.
In another showdown between Tsinghua and Peking, covered in the Southern Metropolis Daily as well as on the CCTV program “News 1+1” on Monday night, a high-scoring Guangdong student named Liu Junyan was bombarded by phone calls from both Tsinghua and Peking for three straight days. The newspaper reported that after Mr. Liu chose to enroll at Peking University Guanghua School of Management, the Tsinghua recruiter told him: “The business management program in Peking University is not very good. Tsinghua’s business management is No. 1.”
Mr. Liu said: “The fight over new recruits is understandable because the recruiters are under so much pressure from the schools that they resort to inappropriate ways to attract students. The recruiters should strengthen their self-discipline, and the authorities should ban the universities from smearing one another. Let rationality rule the recruiting process, and let the students enter their dream schools.”
Besides Mr. Liu, other commenters have seized on the deeper implications of the recruitment battle. An unsigned commentary on the Qianjiang Evening News site points out that Chinese universities’ recruiting tactics are so ruthless that they no longer serve the best interest of the students, but that such tactics occur only in a larger context:
Since recruitment is part of university education and not an independent procedure, to some extent it points to the problems in university education. Furthermore, universities are part of the social fabric. Therefore, the idea that ‘score is everything’ represents a materialistic trend closely linked with the materialistic tendencies in our society. The phenomenon that recruiting students has become ‘recruiting scores’ represents a sickness in universities as well as in society.