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Coy Li

China has ratcheted up scrutiny of degrees from lower-ranked universities overseas in a bid to crack down on academic short-cuts often taken to boost careers.
A total of 13 universities in the Philippines, Mongolia and India have been singled out for more stringent verification of master’s and PhD degrees, the Chinese Service Centre for Scholarly Exchange (CSCSE), under the Ministry of Education, announced last week.
The centre is responsible for certifying academic qualifications obtained overseas, which many Chinese students use to get an edge in the highly competitive domestic job market, or to apply for further studies or household registration, known as hukou, in big cities.
Usually the verification process takes 10-20 working days but the centre said it would take at least 60 days to assess qualifications from those universities, citing “significant anomalies” found in application data for master’s and doctoral degrees from those institutions.
The centre said six of the universities were in the Philippines, five in Mongolia and two in India.
In the World University Ranking 2024 published by Times Higher Education, all but one of the 13 institutions identified by the CSCSE ranked lower than 1,500 on the list, or were not listed.
In recent years, many Chinese have looked to non-elite universities in Western and developing countries that have no entrance exams to upgrade their skills on a budget to better compete in tighter job markets.
However, doubts have been raised about the quality of the higher education degrees and career development programmes offered by such institutions.
At the end of 2022, it was estimated that nearly 100,000 Chinese students were studying in Southeast Asia, and the number was rising, according to the 2022 White Book for Chinese Students of Overseas Education, published by Chinese education services company EIC Education.
A 38-year-old woman from China said she enrolled in a distance learning master’s programme from a university in Manila because there were no entrance requirements and she did not need to take time off work to do the course.
She said she needed the qualification to improve her chance of retaining her job.
“I have the lowest level of education in my company, putting me at high risk of being fired,” she said.
Some of those enrolled in the affected colleges have already been told of new requirements.
A first-year Chinese postgraduate student majoring in educational management at the Philippine Women’s University said she had been taking online classes while living in the Philippines. However, the school told her earlier this month that she would have to attend classes in person next semester, in line with the college’s new requirements.
The woman’s boyfriend, who is also living in the Philippines and taking online classes for a doctorate in performing arts at another one of the 13 universities on the verification list – St Paul University Philippines – was also notified earlier this month that he would have to attend classes in person next semester to meet the new requirements.
In an email to the student, the university said it had been informed earlier this month by China’s Ministry of Education that Chinese students were now required to take 90 per cent of their classes “face-to-face” to be eligible for verification.


George Ji, an overseas study consultant, said about 10 per cent of his clients – most of them on limited budgets and with weak English skills – asked about overseas studies in countries such as the Philippines, Mongolia and India.
“The cost of studying in these countries is less than one-fifth of what it costs in popular countries for overseas studies,” Ji said.
This is not the first time the CSCSE has stepped up verification measures for overseas studies at lower-ranked universities.
In July 2021, the CSCSE said it tightened degree scrutiny over some Belarusian institutions, which the centre said had leveraged Covid-19 restrictions to target the Chinese market with low-quality online courses.
The centre has issued four other warnings against institutions and programmes, most of which are in developing countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
In July 2022, state-run China News Service reported that a college in Hunan province spent more than 18 million yuan (US$2.5 million) to subsidise 23 junior teachers so they could obtain PhDs in philosophy from Adamson University in the Philippines within 28 months, a far shorter time frame than it would otherwise take. The institution was put on an enhanced verification list in November 2021.
Some non-elite universities or vocational colleges in China have had difficulty recruiting people with PhDs, so they tried to boost their proportion of teachers with the qualifications by encouraging their instructors to study in Southeast Asia, where doctoral degrees were easier to obtain.
Ji said a surge of verification applications, caused by the massive expansion of enrolment during the pandemic, may also be a reason for the extra scrutiny.
“For example, if there were only 30 verification applicants from a certain university in the previous year but this year the number surged to 300, the centre would use extra caution to ensure that the university does not sell diplomas or shorten the duration of its programmes,” he said.
Another reason for the added scrutiny could be a disproportionate share of online instruction, Ji said.
Many universities – in China and overseas – began conducting online classes during the pandemic, when the CSCSE said that it could certify degrees obtained through online classes.
But after China lifted its zero-Covid controls and reopened its borders in January 2023, the CSCSE said foreign diplomas and certificates obtained through online classes would no longer be certified.
Another Chinese student taking an online course from the Philippines said that even though her institution was not on the verification list, she was worried that it could be added to the list in the future.
“I should have chosen to do an MBA in China while working,” she said. “Now I regret my decision.”


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Chinese students on edge after education authorities put 13 lower-ranked institutions on verification list over questionable diplomas


Chinese students on edge after education authorities put 13 lower-ranked institutions on a verification list over questionable diplomas.


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