While there is a long history of Chinese students pursuing advanced degrees
While there is a long history of Chinese students pursuing advanced degrees abroad, especially in the United States, there is part of a rapidly growing trend in which Chinese students are choosing to seek their education overseas as early as middle school or high school.
In the 2010-11 school year alone, nearly 24,000 high school-age Chinese were studying in the US, more than 15 percent of the total number of Chinese students in the US overall, up from virtually none five years ago. US middle schools hosted 6,725 Chinese middle schoolers in 2011, up from just 65 in 2006, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
This phenomenon, known as students “growing younger” in Chinese, is seen as resulting from two key interrelated factors: the rigidity of the Chinese education system, and a desire to avoid the gaokao, the country’s rigorous college-entrance exam, for which six-day-a-week preparation begins in 9th grade.
Not surprisingly, officials at schools with a significant number of Chinese students say the students have heightened the sense of competition and achievement. But they also say the students have helped others see a more nuanced and human view of China. For many of the Chinese students themselves, it is most likely the beginning of lives lived abroad, given that the core of their education will have come in English – and without the gaokao.
The most commonly cited reason for “growing younger” is “the general sense that education in China is very rigid, too conservative, and doesn’t encourage creative thinking,” says Tian Fangmeng, a professor at Beijing Normal University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy.