Diplomas For Dollars

It's not simply the parents who are desperate. Educational reforms have removed many of the subsidies schools and universities once depended on. Administrators are now obliged to raise money on their own, which lowers their resistance to bribes. And the admissions process can be the most lucrative transaction of all. If students miss the entrance-exam cutoff score by a few points, they can easily "buy" their way in: it costs $1,200 to $3,600 for a prestigious high school and more for a university slot. Those who score worse can still get in with a big enough bribe. Says one university administrator in Beijing: "Every university engages in this, even the top schools."

--Once students are enrolled, the payoffs sometimes continue. A teacher in Beijing tells of a student trying to shove a roll of 100-yuan notes--totaling several hundred dollars--into his pocket before final exams. Watered-down Ph.D. programs are fetching $5,000 and M.B.A.s can run as much as $30,000. A simple undergraduate education can be had for much less: touts, quietly advertising their merchandise to passers-by, sell fake diplomas for as little as $25 outside the front gates of Beijing's universities. Yang Dongping, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, estimates that there are at least half a million fake diplomas held by supposed graduates in China.

Like everything else in China, this corruption is up for export, too. Chinese students often score near the top on standardized tests, such as the GRE and GMAT. But the crush of students wanting to study abroad has spawned a profusion of test-preparation schools that teach them how to bend, and sometimes break, the rules. One Beijing center guarantees that its "qiang shou"--or "hired guns"--will score at least 700 on the GMAT; more than 100 clients have taken them up on the offer, at $5,000 a pop. In August, when live GRE test questions were posted on the Internet in China, the Educational Testing Service suspended the test's computer version in China, warning graduate schools that GRE scores from China may be inflated by 100 points due to cheating.

The New Oriental School, the most popular test-prep school in China, is ETS's biggest target. Last year, ETS sued New Oriental, which caters to more than 150,000 students, alleging that the school stole its tests and used them to cheat on exams. The school admits only that it used ETS materials, and says it has now stopped doing that. But one enthusiastic young teacher still boasts about using ETS tests to help students ace the exams--and for about $1,200, he'll concoct the rest of a student's application package. His entrepreneurial energy is admirable. But he may be just what China doesn't need right now: another teacher who will go the extra mile, and then take his students all the way to the bank.

© 2002