My previous Dispatch dealt with the opinions and value of “half-pats.” I also mentioned returning Chinese professionals (RCPs) as potential high-value employees. But before you hire an RCP, you might want to understand a little bit about how they became an RCP.
This will be part one of a two-part article about RCPs.
RCP’s come in many flavors, ranging from students with a year or two of Western work experience returning to China because of the soft economy to degree-studded entrepreneurs returning to “seize the day.”
They speak Chinese, they have family and contacts, they know the culture and while they are often out of the current loop, depending on how long they have been away from China, they have the capacity to get up to speed quickly. They can, depending on the fit, be valuable hires and bridges between the theory and reality of running a business with Eastern and Western operations.
As a side note, this does not readily apply to people from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, American-born Chinese (ABC’s) or others who are only genetically Chinese. Many companies in their effort to “localize” their workforce make the mistake of hiring people who look Chinese as opposed to being Chinese. It is a mistake which often takes years to unwind, as there is generally an employment contract which needs to run its course or be bought out.
Getting back to RCPs and their value to businesses in China, I talked to a number of RCPs about their experiences and outlooks and was surprised to hear what some of them described. Eighty percent of RCPs start out as a student studying in the United States.
Unfair at the fair
Understanding how they became U.S. students is the beginning. This is the reason I found myself walking around the crowded 14th China International Education Exhibition Tour (CIEET) on a March Sunday afternoon. CIEET is an education fair where schools from around the globe come to recruit Chinese students. Schools and vendors rent space and for a number of days each year, it becomes ground zero for Chinese students looking to study abroad.
The scene is out of a PT Barnum side show, with hucksters working the crowds as they look for the sucker of the minute. I listened as one ESL program based in Madison offered a 20-percent kickback to a Chinese agent for any students she sent their way. I had my translator ask if this arrangement was disclosed to the students, and he replied that this was something which he would rather not talk about.
Another individual was offering to fill out application forms and write an essay for a mere $10,000 U.S. I asked her what the difference was between her service and the others, and she said that they were more honest about the upfront costs and used very professional people. I said that for what they were charging, I could hire two master’s level employees for a year. She indicated that she thought that they were very competitive with other application services.
Many touted their special connections to various and in one case to all the top colleges in the United States. It turned out that the group with the very special relationship with all the top colleges was headed by a guy who had spent a couple of weeks at Columbia and based on that enlightening experience had decided he was the new U.S. education gatekeeper.
Scammers
Then there were the colleges which offered I-20s (student enrollment certificates which are needed to apply for a U.S. student visa) to anyone willing to cough up the enrollment fee. I stopped and asked a few about their interesting names like “National International University,” based in Los Angeles. They assured me that they were a professional group and pointed me to a picture of an impressive-looking stone building. I then asked about their national accreditation, and they said it was through a special department of the state government, which was interesting because all higher education accreditation in the United States is through peer review organizations recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
Imagine a vast sea of hapless parents with their teenagers in tow, waiting in line to be hot-boxed into forking over what has taken them a lifetime to save or in many cases everything they could borrow. In a one-child society where education is the key to a better life, a degree from a prestigious American university is a golden key to the future. Even a degree from a less well-known university is something special. Depriving and mortgaging themselves to help their child is a Chinese societal norm. Unfortunately, they have little to no idea about the U.S. educational system and are easy prey.
A Wisconsin connection
In an effort to make sense of it, I interviewed Brad Van Den Elzen, Ph.D., director, foreign students and ESL programs of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. This was the university’s fifth time participating in CIEET. I asked him what he thought of the event and the odd assortment of questionable vendors, and he indicated that CIEET is actually one on the more reputable education shows and that about 70 percent of the participants were legitimate.
I asked if it felt strange to be in the midst of it all, and he indicated that it was an important tool in recruiting and that it had allowed the university to increase its Chinese recruits from seven in 2004 to 100 last fall. At $6,800 (vs. $2,900 per semester for in-state tuition), foreign students paying higher tuitions are becoming an important source of revenue for the school.
Elzen indicated that the Chinese students tended to select accounting, business, web design, digital media and paper science as their areas of study. Apart from being shy about asking for help, the Chinese students attending Point had, with some assistance from the university, acclimated very well. He estimated that about four out of five of the Chinese Point students would be returning to China, due in part to the economic outlook in the United States. The remaining students would either continue their education or try to get some working experience in the United States.
