Buying ‘guaranteed acceptance’ to elite US universities: the risks and rewards for Chinese students
- Chinese students are paying education ‘consultants’ to get them into top US universities by falsifying grades, academic transcripts and personal statements
It was a chilly April night in 2020 in Orange County, California. The clock read 3.20am and Zang couldn’t sleep, plagued by insomnia since the state issued a stay-at-home order on March 19 amid a coronavirus outbreak.
The then-22-year-old had come to the United States from China in 2016 to pursue a bachelor’s degree, and was a month away from graduation. Now, another big decision loomed: return home or, as his parents preferred, stay and earn a graduate degree.
In the depths of Covid-19, the prospect of going back to China – with its limited flights, overpriced tickets and strict quarantine policies – was depressing. But with his not-amazing 2.5 grade point average (GPA), getting into an American graduate school did not seem likely.
Besides the fact that neither transcripts nor high scores on either English-proficiency test mentioned seemed to matter, there was, right at the bottom, the logo of a top-40 American university.
This was but one of many education consultants selling their services on WeChat. Some offer help writing a résumé or a school application essay, whereas others, like the one Zang found, sell something he read in Chinese as “bǎolùqǔ”, or “guaranteed acceptance”.
