MEDFORD, Ore. — In 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Education established its first North American Confucius Classroom at St. Mary’s School. This fall, the private Catholic secondary school will launch its sixth international program in China.
St. Mary’s is already partnered with high schools in Shanghai, Wuhan, Shunde, Pinghu and Guiyang, and it has plans to open a branch at a high school in Zhengzhou, the capital of the Henan Province, in September.
Frank Phillips, St. Mary’s head of school, has been working with Boston-based consulting firm KnowledgeLink to establish these international partnerships.
Since 2008, Phillips has taken the more than 13-hour flight to China 26 times — 11 of those since 2012, when the first dual-diploma international program, St. Mary’s-Shanghai, was established. On these trips, Phillips visits each of the campuses to host open houses for interested parents, observe classes and provide administrative support to the 38 American teachers and principals and make sure the curriculum is being implemented properly.
In China, Phillips explained, education is mandatory through the ninth grade, at which point students take their high school entrance exam, or “zhong kao,” to determine whether they can advance to high school.
“If they don’t get a qualifying grade for high school, then they’re done . and will probably end up making things in a factory somewhere,” he said.
Students who pass are placed in schools, ranked by the Chinese government, according to their exam score.
“In China, students are excruciatingly aware of their class ranking,” Phillips said.
High school students take as many as 11 classes a day, and many attend boot camps on the weekend to prepare them for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and China’s national college-entrance examination, the infamous “gao kao.”
The latter test is offered only once a year — it doesn’t matter if you have the flu — and determines which students will go to college and the colleges to which they can apply.
According to an article published in The Huffington Post, 9.15 million Chinese students were competing for 6.85 million college openings in 2012.
Every year, Beijing University, which Phillips refers to as the “Harvard of China,” receives about 300 qualified applications per seat available.
“People who can afford to opt out of the Chinese university system do so,” Phillips added.
And students who study English in high school or participate in a foreign exchange program have a better shot at getting into an American college.
“Many students from China fare poorly at American colleges because their English isn’t good, they haven’t been trained for discussion-based classes, and they don’t know how to write essays,” Phillips said.
Enter St. Mary’s. This year, 68 international students, including 55 from China, attend St. Mary’s. In 2015-16, St. Mary’s will serve about 800 Chinese students at its six international branches. Those students will take electives taught by American teachers, in addition to classes required for a Chinese diploma, and will graduate with a Chinese and American diploma, increasing their odds of being successful at an American university.
Phillips said it costs between $15,000 and $20,000 for a student to enroll in an international program on their home campus, compared with $50,000 to participate in a foreign exchange program on St. Mary’s Medford campus.
For its role in the partnership, St. Mary’s receives $500 per student per year. This revenue stream, which will be about $400,000 next year, goes toward scholarships for local students to St. Mary’s.
Every year, the school awards about $1 million in scholarships, and about 40 percent of the students in the school are receiving at least a partial scholarship.
The international programs provided enough revenue during the economic downturn for the school to maintain its financial commitment to local students, Phillips said.
Phillips said he would ultimately like to establish international programs in a dozen Chinese schools and facilitate opportunities for local students to study at those schools.
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