Shanghai Street View: Evolving Education
This week’s Street View takes us to Yangpu District and my workplace at Fudan University, as classes resume after our long summer recess and students surprise me with the latest new trends in higher education. My own classes in the Journalism School contain the usual lists of students in their early 20s, but I was amused to see that my colleagues in the math department will be welcoming a youthful 14-year-old prodigy into their ranks this year.
In a different sign of the times, another headline noted that up to 40 percent of incoming freshmen at Fudan are using the Tenpay online payments service to pay their tuition this year. Of course the more popular Alipay might dispute that figure, which does seem quite high for such a new service. But the bottom line is that students are conducting more and more of their lives electronically, especially over popular platforms like Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Tmall.
Higher education in China has changed so much over the last 2 decades that someone who went to university in the 1980s would barely recognize the landscape today. The Beijing university where I taught in the 1980s has grown from around 1,000 students then to many thousands now, and state-of-the-art facilities have replaced an older generation of aging classrooms and dormitories.
But one constant over the years has been students’ ages, which generally start around 18 for college undergraduates and 21 or 22 for graduate students. So I was surprised to read that Fudan’s math department this year admitted a 14-year-old prodigy, the university’s youngest student ever. But the young Xiao Yuhe just barely took the record, as Fudan also admitted 2 other students who were just a few months older.
Xiao certainly qualifies as a prodigy, having completed the usual 8-year secondary school curriculum in just 4 years. He obviously also got a perfect score on the math portion of the gaokao college entrance exam. He was peppered with questions from curious reporters as he recently moved into his dormitory, and jokingly admitted one of his biggest first assignments will be learning everyday tasks like how to make his bed and wash his clothes.
The enrollment of such prodigies in college at such young ages is relatively common in the US, and always the subject of debate. Proponents argue such young students would be wasting their time in a normal high school, and can only get a challenging education at universities. Opponents say these students may be intellectual advanced, but are still quite immature psychologically and should remain with others at a similar stage of emotional development.
Outcast Nerds
We had one such student in my high school class, though she only went to university at the age of 16 rather than 14. But she was always a bit of a misfit, and I imagine she probably spent most of her time studying at university and didn’t make many friends among older students. We had one or two other young prodigies in our midst at high school, and most were largely ignored by older students who considered them under-aged nerds.
Perhaps in a more academic-oriented China the situation will be different. But I suspect that in the end the young Xiao will face 4 years of similar social isolation in his pursuit of a degree at Fudan.
While Xiao could face a solitary future, anyone who paid his tuition electronically this year appears to be in much better company. According to Tencent’s own estimates, between 30 and 40 percent of incoming Fudan freshmen paid their college tuition this year over Tenpay, often using the service over their accounts on the wildly popular WeChat service. Anyone who lives in China knows how popular WeChat has become over the last 2 years, and I’ll openly admit I conduct the big majority of my mobile communication over the platform now.
At Fudan, WeChat has also become the preferred way for both teachers and students to communicate, due to its ability to organize ad hoc and long-term groups to facilitate discussion between students, teachers and combinations of both. Tencent has seized on this to promote e-commerce services on the WeChat platform, and paying tuition is just one of those.
Tencent boasted that it averaged 1,000 tuition-related transactions daily for Fudan in the run-up to the school year, and posted a single day high of 3 million yuan ($470,000) in transaction volume. Such numbers certainly don’t surprise me, since my students are all experts at using electronic networks for everything, with the result that not many of them use cash anymore these days.
And on that note, I’ll take my own break for lunch, which will take me past the building where I charge up my Fudan stored-value card and the area where dozens of couriers gather daily to drop off their large volumes of e-commerce packages. Who knows, perhaps on the way I’ll even run into 1 or 2 child prodigy students, who can teach me a thing or two about finding bargains and shuffling electronic money online.
