If you had a nickel for every top-tier China studies department in American colleges—counting only the top 25—you’d have $1.25. And there are many more schools with programs below the top 25. If you had $1.25 and a Chinese studies degree, you might appreciate having that much money.
There are a lot of American schools with China studies programs but not a lot of students. The number of graduates in 2023 was 71 for the entire USA. This may not even equal one graduate per China department. So one must ask what on earth is going on?
Expensive and tough
Let’s look at one hypothetical undergraduate from Syracuse University with a minor, just a minor, in Chinese Studies. Here’s what he must do to demonstrate the expected “learning outcomes”:
1. Describe basic knowledge of Chinese culture and society both historically and in the contemporary period.
2. Examine critically the evolution of Chinese culture and society both historically and in the contemporary period.
3. Establish basic competency in verbal and written Chinese [!].
4. Extend knowledge as [a global citizen] by living, traveling, and learning in China [!].
The student had to pay the tuition, pay to travel and live abroad, and learn a hard language, among other things. Tuition at Syracuse University this year is $65,528.
The American University Chinese Studies major is even tougher than the Syracuse minor, requiring greater proficiency in Chinese, more course hours, and even 12 credit hours in an additional language. This year, tuition there is $60,270, and the estimated total cost of attendance is $83,680 per year.
It’s going to be hard to earn back those expenses.
Few graduates with a bachelor’s degree will be competitive for China-centric civil service analyst positions in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, or other federal bureaucracies. But some could be welcome in the government as interpreters or translators—given passing grades in language tests. With a little seniority and time, such lucky ones will earn in the low five figures, eventually maybe more.
Meanwhile, according to Salary.com, Chinese translators average $64,859 per year.
Over at Indeed.com, several jobs are posted with income figures: for a bilingual senior technician, up to $60,000; for an interpreter/translator, up to $26.48/hour; for an interpretation instructor in Cantonese, up to $40/hour.
Wow. Are these university programs just scams that prey upon gullible youth?
Or $100,000
One way to inflate the purported salaries of Chinese studies grads is to reclassify them as seen at datausa.io, where they categorize any such grad as a Cultural & Gender Studies major and where “the most common occupations are lawyers, & judges, magistrates, & other judicial workers, elementary & middle school teachers, and postsecondary teachers.” Average salary? $99,300.
Imagine painting such a financial picture for a naïve undergraduate.
So we have all these schools, all these China Studies departments, fighting for their one annual graduate with departments that are staffed with…what? With multiple professors, maybe a secretary and an administrator too. This cannot make sense without subsidies and endowments. Are there such? (A subject for another post perhaps.)
Note also that these U.S. schools are competing for students with Red China itself. “There are 274 Chinese universities offering scholarships for international students every year.” And: “Every year 49,000 international students receive scholarships in China. China is one of the fastest growing destinations for global education.”
Beijing’s programs are growing as U.S. diplomas awarded in China studies declined 5.33% from 2022 to 2023.
Maybe there’s a silver lining here: “Due to the One Belt and One Road project, most [communist] schools exclusively provide scholarships to ASEAN and CIS countries.”
Joint and out of joint
But in the competition with stateside China studies, there remains another threat, that of “2,356 [Beijing-]approved joint venture educational programs and institutions” based in Red China (as of 2021).
Among these are ”joint venture universities”: U.S. and communist. There appear to be just four of them that are structured this way, i.e., as Red Chinese legal entities. Which likely means lots of state subsidies.
One of these joint ventures, New York University Shanghai “aspires to accommodate 2,000 undergrads.” NYUSH boasts of students from 84 countries, and a friendly little AI program told me that 20 percent of its students are American.
So there may be up to 400 American undergrads in just one foreign China studies program, whereas there are only 71 American undergrads in a whole raft of programs in the entire United States.
Cornell, meanwhile, is not a “joint university.” But it runs an overseas program that is popular enough to attract scammers. We see this on its website:
● Cornell does not, nor has it, worked in collaboration with third-party companies or organizations to offer postdoctoral or research certificate programs.
● Third parties do not collect tuition or fees on behalf of Cornell.
● Cornell does not work with or endorse such organizations including, but not limited to, Shanghai Lufei Education Technology Co., Ltd. (Chinese name: 上海璐斐教育科技有限公司) and Shenzhen Guoyan Era Education Technology Co., Ltd. (Chinese name: 深圳市国研时代教育科技有限公司).
If our own universities are going to take advantage of young people, who can blame alien criminals for getting in on the action? □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
