Insights into Chinese Students in Beijing — June 2015
Over the course of the last two weeks of June 2015, I spent a considerable amount of time in Beijing, China.
Two years ago — a friend of mine contacted me to see if I would be interested in helping recently graduated high school students learn how to apply for college in America and to give them some insights into how one could get into a college like Purdue or Stanford.
At the start of this exercise, I wondered, “Shouldn’t these kids already have great colleges here in China or know how to apply in America?” How quickly I learned that what I expected was not even near the truth.
Ten years ago, my friend Stacey and I came to Beijing on a boat cruise — deciding to explore the various Asian countries. We started in Beijing before we went around the Oceania area — and I stayed at the Beijing Crown Plaza, which overlooked the Beijing Opera and a particular intersection of the 3rd Ring. Back then, the streets were crowded — insanely choked with cyclists — and the buildings were nowhere at a level a Westerner used to NYC would be impressed with.
Today, I am in the new Crown Plaza, which is only a stones throw away from the original, and life has changed considerably. Beijing has such traffic congestion that it makes me long for a ride on the 405 — especially around rush hour. Going two kilometers can take 30 minutes — with the insanity of traffic that exists. But the modernization of Beijing is incredible with so many buildings and cars and everything happening in a short decade.
I bring up this disparity in time because back when I visited Beijing in 2005, I was told of these amazing schools where the brightest of the bright were being schooled in various arts and skills — going to dominate the world with their incredible talents. I worried that a country of 1B people would have a graduating class of 7M students every year — and if the top 1% were as good as our top 1%, then we were going to be dominated by some of the masters of Chinese culture in the world.
Today, 9.4M students took the Chinese equivalent of the SAT — a test they call the…
