How We Did 'Lost in Translation’
Bloomberg News editor at large Daniel Golden, along with colleague Oliver Staley, was awarded EWA's Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting at its 2012 National Seminar on May 19 for the series, Lost in Translation. Golden agreed to write a first-person description of how they put the series together. For more information about the grand prize and the EWA National Awards for Education Reporting, visit our website.
This series began with a chance encounter. On a flight from Washington D.C. to Boston, I fell into conversation with two fellow passengers, who turned out to be college admissions consultants returning from China. They told me that a Beijing-based test-prep firm, New Oriental Education, had "cracked the code" of the SATs.
They referred me to an admissions dean at a U.S. university deluged with Chinese applicants -- many of whom had achieved high verbal scores on the SAT and TOEFL (Test of English as a Second Language) courtesy of New Oriental but proved unable to speak English when they arrived on campus. The dean and his counterparts at other schools put me in touch with New Oriental graduates who were glad to talk about its uncanny methods. They also referred me to New Oriental teachers in China, whom I interviewed by phone -- running up a $400 tab for one call. My expense-account manager at Bloomberg gulped but paid.
I was also in China to work on a second story -- about the role of unscrupulous agents in placing Chinese students at U.S. colleges and high schools. I had learned from interviews with admissions officials and consultants that more and more U.S. colleges pay agents in China a commission for each student enrolled -- an incentive that's banned when recruiting U.S. students. Agents, who also charge the families thousands of dollars, help fill out applications, ghost-write essays and arrange visas.
Seeking a compelling narrative to illuminate this broad problem, I attended the China International Education Exhibition, a Beijing event flooded with agents representing colleges from the U.S. and other countries. At a booth with a "University of Connecticut" banner, UConn's supposed representatives showed me business cards identifying themselves as directors of admission at its China office--a title I found unlikely--and as employees of a company called Beijing Star. They told me they were recruiting Chinese students to enroll at UConn's branch in Torrington, Connecticut. I had often visited UConn's main campus in Storrs but had never heard of Torrington.
Suspecting that something was amiss, I dropped by another college fair the next day to meet an admissions representative from the Storrs campus. She told me that the supposed directors of China admissions were not affiliated with UConn but were actually agents for a Connecticut businessman.
Returning to the US, I talked with UConn administrators in both Storrs and Torrington, and interviewed the businessman. I learned that he was charging two Chinese students, Leon Lin and Li Rirong, $22,200 a year apiece to share a room in an otherwise empty inn. When I visited the inn, the students told me that he had promised them flight training, equestrian lessons, river rafting and other recreations, none of which materialized. The UConn branch where he'd steered them turned out to be a commuter campus with no other Chinese students and scant English instruction. Lin and Li told me that, except for going to class and a take-out Chinese restaurant, they hardly ever left their room.
"It's just a desert for them here," Torrington's student affairs coordinator told me.
As I delved more deeply into US-China educational relations, I came across helpful data sources. The Institute of International Education's Open Doors report provides numbers of foreign students at U.S. colleges by country of origin and academic level. Many colleges give statistics about their international population on their institutional research web sites. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Department of Homeland Security, tracks the number of students from China and other countries attending specific private high schools.
Such data helped confirm what sources were telling me -- that evangelical high schools in the U.S. are recruiting Chinese students, hoping to convert them to Christianity. My New Oriental contacts came in handy because the test-prep firm, which also acts as an agent, was hooking Chinese students up with religious high schools.
I focused on Ben Lippen High in Columbia, South Carolina, which had 80 students from China, among the most of any Christian school. I gathered names of current and former Chinese students at Ben Lippen through their Facebook pages and Internet reports about the school's sports teams and extra-curricular activities, and contacted them about their experiences. Then I visited the school. I found that many of the Chinese students came from atheist backgrounds and were ill-prepared for an intense religious environment.
In other articles, Oliver Staley and I exposed the lack of academic freedom at U.S. branches in China; the failure of U.S. colleges to stand up for faculty members banned from China; and pressure from China-sponsored Confucius Institutes to dampen discussion of Tibet and other controversial topics at U.S. universities.
Based on this experience, I would offer the following tips to education writers:
1) There's no substitute for being there - whether the "there" is China or Connecticut or Columbia, S.C. A day of reporting in person is worth a month of phone calls. Getting the most out of a trip requires proper preparation, such as setting up interviews in advance, anticipating where you'll find scenes and descriptive color, and leaving free time for the unexpected.
2) I don't have Skype, but I think it would have been very helpful. Most Chinese students use it and prefer it to phone calls.
3) Always look for a narrative to dramatize an issue for readers.
4) If you work for an international news organization, get in touch with colleagues in overseas bureaus. They may help with reporting, contacts, and information about government restrictions on information-gathering.
5) A good interpreter can be invaluable. My interpreter in China, a graduate student there, connected with a former classmate who had worked for an unscrupulous agent concocting admissions essays and gave me an insider's view of the business.
This series began with a chance encounter. On a flight from Washington D.C. to Boston, I fell into conversation with two fellow passengers, who turned out to be college admissions consultants returning from China. They told me that a Beijing-based test-prep firm, New Oriental Education, had "cracked the code" of the SATs.
They referred me to an admissions dean at a U.S. university deluged with Chinese applicants -- many of whom had achieved high verbal scores on the SAT and TOEFL (Test of English as a Second Language) courtesy of New Oriental but proved unable to speak English when they arrived on campus. The dean and his counterparts at other schools put me in touch with New Oriental graduates who were glad to talk about its uncanny methods. They also referred me to New Oriental teachers in China, whom I interviewed by phone -- running up a $400 tab for one call. My expense-account manager at Bloomberg gulped but paid.
On a 16-day journey in March, 2011, to Beijing, Shanghai and Hongzhou, I tracked down current and former New Oriental administrators, students and teachers. They explained how New Oriental's exhaustive dissection of old test questions has produced astonishing breakthroughs in gaming college-admissions exams.
I was also in China to work on a second story -- about the role of unscrupulous agents in placing Chinese students at U.S. colleges and high schools. I had learned from interviews with admissions officials and consultants that more and more U.S. colleges pay agents in China a commission for each student enrolled -- an incentive that's banned when recruiting U.S. students. Agents, who also charge the families thousands of dollars, help fill out applications, ghost-write essays and arrange visas.
Seeking a compelling narrative to illuminate this broad problem, I attended the China International Education Exhibition, a Beijing event flooded with agents representing colleges from the U.S. and other countries. At a booth with a "University of Connecticut" banner, UConn's supposed representatives showed me business cards identifying themselves as directors of admission at its China office--a title I found unlikely--and as employees of a company called Beijing Star. They told me they were recruiting Chinese students to enroll at UConn's branch in Torrington, Connecticut. I had often visited UConn's main campus in Storrs but had never heard of Torrington.
Suspecting that something was amiss, I dropped by another college fair the next day to meet an admissions representative from the Storrs campus. She told me that the supposed directors of China admissions were not affiliated with UConn but were actually agents for a Connecticut businessman.
Returning to the US, I talked with UConn administrators in both Storrs and Torrington, and interviewed the businessman. I learned that he was charging two Chinese students, Leon Lin and Li Rirong, $22,200 a year apiece to share a room in an otherwise empty inn. When I visited the inn, the students told me that he had promised them flight training, equestrian lessons, river rafting and other recreations, none of which materialized. The UConn branch where he'd steered them turned out to be a commuter campus with no other Chinese students and scant English instruction. Lin and Li told me that, except for going to class and a take-out Chinese restaurant, they hardly ever left their room.
"It's just a desert for them here," Torrington's student affairs coordinator told me.
As I delved more deeply into US-China educational relations, I came across helpful data sources. The Institute of International Education's Open Doors report provides numbers of foreign students at U.S. colleges by country of origin and academic level. Many colleges give statistics about their international population on their institutional research web sites. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Department of Homeland Security, tracks the number of students from China and other countries attending specific private high schools.
Such data helped confirm what sources were telling me -- that evangelical high schools in the U.S. are recruiting Chinese students, hoping to convert them to Christianity. My New Oriental contacts came in handy because the test-prep firm, which also acts as an agent, was hooking Chinese students up with religious high schools.
I focused on Ben Lippen High in Columbia, South Carolina, which had 80 students from China, among the most of any Christian school. I gathered names of current and former Chinese students at Ben Lippen through their Facebook pages and Internet reports about the school's sports teams and extra-curricular activities, and contacted them about their experiences. Then I visited the school. I found that many of the Chinese students came from atheist backgrounds and were ill-prepared for an intense religious environment.
In other articles, Oliver Staley and I exposed the lack of academic freedom at U.S. branches in China; the failure of U.S. colleges to stand up for faculty members banned from China; and pressure from China-sponsored Confucius Institutes to dampen discussion of Tibet and other controversial topics at U.S. universities.
Based on this experience, I would offer the following tips to education writers:
1) There's no substitute for being there - whether the "there" is China or Connecticut or Columbia, S.C. A day of reporting in person is worth a month of phone calls. Getting the most out of a trip requires proper preparation, such as setting up interviews in advance, anticipating where you'll find scenes and descriptive color, and leaving free time for the unexpected.
2) I don't have Skype, but I think it would have been very helpful. Most Chinese students use it and prefer it to phone calls.
3) Always look for a narrative to dramatize an issue for readers.
4) If you work for an international news organization, get in touch with colleagues in overseas bureaus. They may help with reporting, contacts, and information about government restrictions on information-gathering.
5) A good interpreter can be invaluable. My interpreter in China, a graduate student there, connected with a former classmate who had worked for an unscrupulous agent concocting admissions essays and gave me an insider's view of the business.
Labels: China, contest 2011, higher ed
posted by Lori at
11:15 AM
1 Comments:
Good point about the value of on-site research: "A day of reporting in person is worth a month of phone calls." Skype is sometimes the next best thing, and could have definitely helped cut down on the $400 phone calls to China! Kidding aside, this was an excellent, eye-opening series. Can't wait for your next project!
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