A couple of years ago, I wrote a short piece on what was becoming an unsustainable situation at American colleges. And it is a phenomenon not limited to universities, but also some American private high schools, in their thirst for money, who could not resist Chinese cash. Two years later, John Pomfret wrote a remarkable piece on what is now a more quickly deteriorating situation, changing the model of American education.

It is not about the numbers but about the way the exceptional American system of the past has changed its priorities, putting the money first. “It’s money,” writes Pomfret for SupChina. “Both private and public universities are aggressively marketing themselves to Chinese students because they want Chinese who can pay full tuition. For America’s state schools, faced with diminishing resources and budget cuts, the prospect of thousands of Chinese students paying full freight is too good to be true. For them, Chinese cash has become more important than Chinese students or the course of U.S.-China relations.”
This is no longer is about building bridges between two cultures or even economies. It is about greed, and Pomfret also explains the impact of the changing standards and procedures on the quality of the educational process. On the other hand, SupChina, which is becoming an interesting selection of reading on all things Chinese, is publishing a second piece, following some of the Chinese students who have returned home after their studies in the U.S.