For my Grade 12 students in Beijing, this has been the worst and the best few weeks of their young lives. These were the weeks that they received their final A Level grades, the ones that will determine whether they get their university places or not. The good news I can report is that all of them were successful and that for 90% of them this means that their long cherished dreams of studying in the UK are about to come true.
The challenges for my students in achieving this academic dream should not be underestimated. This is not an education path anyone would choose without a deep commitment to learning and achievement. To become a Chinese student at an international private school means opting out of the state education system, with very little chance to go back if you fail. To become an international student means choosing to study the equivalent of GCSE and A Level examinations in a second language. How would you have felt about doing all of your examination year study in French or Spanish? For my students this means extended independent study deep into their evenings, weekends and holidays. This is not a choice to be lightly made, or made for spurious reasons.
I think there’s a stereotype that many Chinese international students are the victims of over ambitious parents who are desperate for the financial or kudos rewards of studying abroad. I can only say that in my ten years experience of supporting students and families, on the rare occasions that this is the case, it inevitably ends in failure. Unless the student her or himself has cast-iron self-motivation to overcome the numerous challenges of following the arduous international path, sooner or later the problems become insurmountable.
The truth is that it’s the children themselves who are driven by a dream of what international education can do for every aspect of their lives. Some have life plans that lead to jobs abroad. Others plan to return and work in China. It doesn’t matter, they believe that education in an international setting will allow them to develop to their full potential. I have many humbling experiences while interviewing children and families where they tell me the extent of their ambitions. In one this year I met with a family whose daughter has her heart dead set on becoming a vet, just as my own daughter did at the same age. The young lady took over the interview and explained in convincing detail how she’d searched the internet to find the royal veterinary college of London and talked me through the exact course she wanted there. And she was not fazed at all by my explanations of the English, not to mention Latin, language barriers to achieving her goals.
There are some in the UK who are of the opinion that international students in general, and maybe Chinese students in particular, are in the UK for some sort of nefarious reasons, sent here to damage ‘our’ country. I’m sure five minutes sat talking to my students would challenge any such misinterpretations. The humbling thing is that my Chinese students are more patriotic about the UK than most of us. For them Britain is still the ‘shining academic institution on top of the hill’. They love the history of the universities they are applying to, certainly far more than I did at their age. Many of the boys love our football and can’t wait to sit in the stands at one of the grounds they have watched online since they were young. The girls, both more level-headed and imaginative than the boys, dream of beautiful English back-drops to future selfies and how confident and successful they can be in an England committed to gender equality.
Another stereotype might be that international students are sent here to ‘steal’ from Britain. To be honest this is laughable because Chinese progress in Sciences, Engineering and Technology mean that it already has world leading ideas. In 2022 China broke through to become the world leader in new patents, ahead of the USA and Japan. International students who want to come to the UK to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths subjects to Master’s level already have to go through an additional level of vetting to secure a visa. Moreover, any student who has been educated through an international school knows that knowledge is a fusion of ideas from different cultures, because that’s how international education works. For example in our school we say that education has ‘a Chinese root and international fruit’. It’s the exchange of ideas and cultures that matters. I am sure that international schools around the world tell their students, just like we do, that one of the great benefits of studying abroad is to ‘give’ whatever you can to your university and your university colleagues by being a cultural ambassador and teacher.
I’ve heard there is also a belief that Chinese students or families receive financial support for undergraduate study. The truth is that the families of my students make enormous sacrifices to pay the horrendously high costs of university education in the UK. These are not elite families. They are exactly the same as aspirational families in the UK who scrimp and save to send their child to a private school in the hope of a better future. In fact I should share with you that some of the families I work with drive themselves to the point of breakdown because one or both parents are working so hard to pay for the child’s education that they have too little time to spend together as a family. We shouldn’t be suspicious of this. Chinese thinking is exactly the same as the best of British family thinking, which values above all things, investment in the future of the next generation.
In 2022/2023, 154,000 Chinese students were studying in British universities. But we need to bear in mind too that during this period, Chinese universities have been improving significantly. In the QS World University ranking both Tsinghua and Peking Universities are now in the top 20, while Shanghai Jiao Tong and Fudan universities are in the top 50. There are encouraging signs of UK universities trying to grow tentative partnerships with Chinese universities to enable more British students to study at least part of their degree courses in China. In fact the Chinese government will give financial support to foreign students who want to follow Masters or Doctoral studies at Tsinghua University. Future collaboration between higher education research sectors are not only of benefit to the two countries concerned, but to the wider world. For example the UK is developing cutting edge research and practical technologies in the area of industrial decarbonisation, with potential enormous reductions in carbon dioxide damage to the atmosphere, and China is an important partner in this research.
There is no place for the narrow self-interest of nationalism in education and research, especially when research addresses itself to existential problems threatening the whole of humanity. Shortly each one of my students will take up studies across the UK: in Bristol, in Warwick, in Durham, Edinburgh and of course in London. They will pour the precious, hard earned funds of their families into the British economy. They will be sitting next to you on buses and trains as they explore a country they love. They will be in MacDonalds or Tescos or the Chinese supermarket buying convenient noodles to make their money go a little further. Our contribution at SACU is to do our bit to make sure that each one of them is seen for the content of her or his character and not through the lens of dangerous stereotypes, stereotypes that damage the lives of those who see the world in such distorted ways as well as the lives of the victims of such lies.
