介绍:
Hello and welcome to Education Today. I'm Wu You in Beijing. This week we are taking a trip around the world with a series of special episodes which cover education in different countries. Yesterday we looked at Israel.
So what're we going to look at today?
Today we're looking at the US.
For more about the Chinese students in the US, I've talked with Eric Black embassy officer in the US embassy in Beijing. He works in the cultural affairs office as the education officer.
"How many Chinese students are there currently studying in the US?
Well every year in november, the state department with it's partner the international institute of education or IIE, releases a report called the open doors report. It's a report about student mobility , international students around the world that come to the United States. The report surveys of the 4,500 acredited US universities and colleges in the United States, they survey about 3,000 of them and ask them "Do you have international students? Are they there for graduate programmes? Are they there for undergraduate? Where are they from?" These kinds of questions. So the last report was November last year so I'll give you statistics on last year. We'll be having a press conference next month to announce the new results but last year the open doors report showed that there were 235,000 Chinese students in the United States studying in graduate programmes and undergraduate programmes and also taking advantage of something called OPT which is Optional Practical Training. It's basically the ability to stay in the United States for a year after you finish your degree to do an internship or to build your skills. It's an incredible number of Chinese students. I think it's actually the largest group of students anywhere to come to one country to study and last year alone it counted about a 21% increase over the previous year. It's amazing.
So is there any new latest policies to attract more Chinese students to study in the US?
The United States continues to welcome Chinese students and students from all over the world to come to our campuses. The United States has some of the very best universities and faculty in all kinds of fields and I think that's why so many people, particularly those from China, are coming to the United States to study. There are no new policies, just more of the same to help encourage people to make the best choices and that's why we're here at the fair. Education USA understands that sometimes the process of applying for college in another country, particularly in the United States, might be complex so we've simplified that process through our five steps to study in the United States. The first step is to research your options and we do free seminars about how to do that. Step number two is prepare your finances for it. On our website and also in seminars we talk about the financial aid and the scholarships that are available for Chinese students interested in studying in the United States. The third step is to prepare your application yourself. We teach that the first lesson of going to study in the United States is to do your own application not let somebody else write your essay or fill it out for you. You should do it just like American students. Fourth step in preparing is to get your visa and we walk through the process of how you get a visa at the US embassy to study. The final step is prepare for your departure and we find that parents particularly like this step because they're concerned at having their son or daughter go over to the United States and attend the campuses so we work about how you can prepare for that, what kinds of culture differences'll be and what kind of conditions you can encounter. So those are the five steps that we share at Education USA.
More Chinese parents are sending their kids at a very early age to the US. So in your opinion, do you think it is very wise for the parents to send their kids to the US high school or senior high schools to study at a very early age?
Let me first answer that question by saying that Education USA focuses on Higher Education. We don't offer services or advice about going to the United States at younger ages. Our services are to help people who want to go to undergraduate or graduate programmes. Now I'm a father. I have five children. My oldest is a sophmore in high school and we're starting to talk about college and it would be very hard for me to imagine her having leave my home to go study somewhere else right now because I love having her with us and so I think for parents you need to decided together with your child if that's what makes sense. There are some students, some children that are very independent and they're ready for that kind of a challenge and there're boarding schools in the United States, private schools and other options for those children. But it needs to be a choice by the parents.
So since we all know that there's a latest incident that happened in the US in the Southern California's University, a Chinese student was beaten to death around the campus, not in the campus, the students and parents also worrying about that. Could you give us a very short explanation, or a very short introduction about how the education ministry or some certain departments or the campuses, they can make sure the students, especially the Chinese students going to the US, are safe?
I'm glad you raised that question. Safety is a concern for every university or college in the United States. If the students don't feel safe, they can't succeed and that doesn't matter if they're American students or Chinese students or students from Africa. Almost every University president one the first things they consider after the equality of their academic programme is the safety of their students. One of the differences between the United States and China is that the safety component is organised locally by the individual universities. The
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