Indian students rank 2nd last in global test

15 Jan, 2012, 02.37AM IST, Hemali Chhapia,TNN

MUMBAI: Across the world, India is seen as an education powerhouse - based largely on the reputation of a few islands of academic excellence such as the IITs. But scratch the glossy surface of our education system and the picture turns seriously bleak.

Fifteen-year-old Indians who were put, for the first time, on a global stage stood second to last, only beating Kyrgyzstan when tested on their reading, math and science abilities.

India ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted annually to evaluate education systems worldwide by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat. The survey is based on two-hour tests that half a million students are put through.

China's Shanghai province, which participated in PISA for the first time, scored the highest in reading. It also topped the charts in mathematics and science.

"More than one-quarter of Shanghai's 15 year olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%," noted the analysis.

The states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, showpieces for education and development, were selected by the central government to participate in PISA, but their test results were damning.

15-yr-old Indians 200 points behind global topper

Tamil Nadu and Himachal, showpieces of India's education and development, fared miserably at the Programme for International Student Asssment, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretariat.

An analysis of the performance of the two states showed:

In math, considered India's strong point, they finished second and third to last, beating only Kyrgyzstan

When the Indian students were asked to read English text, again Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh were better than only Kyrgyzstan. Girls were better than boys

The science results were the worst. Himachal Pradesh stood last, this time behind Kyrgyzstan. Tamil Nadu was slightly better and finished third from the bottom

The average 15-year-old Indian is over 200 points behind the global topper. Comparing scores, experts estimate that an Indian eighth grader is at the level of a South Korean third grader in math abilities or a second-year student from Shanghai when it comes to reading skills.

The report said: "In Himachal, 11% of students are estimated to have a proficiency in reading literacy that is at or above the baseline level needed to participate effectively and productively in life. It follows that 89% of students in Himachal are estimated to be below that baseline level."

Clearly, India will have to ramp up its efforts and get serious about what goes on in its schools. "Better educational outcomes are a strong predictor for future economic growth," OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria told The Times of India.

"While national income and educational achievement are still related, PISA shows that two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results. This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly-educated countries is now out of date."

In case of scientific literacy levels in TN, students were estimated to have a mean score that was below the means of all OECD countries, but better than Himachal. Experts are unsure if selecting these two states was a good idea.

Shaheen Mistry, CEO of Teach For India programme, said, "I am glad that now there is data that lets people know how far we still have to go."

If everyone did a Worrall Thompson, maybe Tesco wouldn't be too big to fail

Tesco's poor results have led it to review its practices. The self-service tills used by Wozza may be a good place to start

• 
• • Marina Hyde
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 January 2012 21.00 GMT
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Illustration by Otto

Sad news for Tesco, which this week discovered an unexpected item in its bagging area. The rogue element has since been identified as "awful Christmas sales and a profits warning", and the company's chief executive Philip Clarke now appears to be having problems removing this item before continuing with Tesco's hitherto unstoppable rise. I do hope he has to wait a long time for assistance.

Britain ceased to be a nation of shopkeepers some time ago, as the local independent stores had the life bled out of them by the supermarket giants. But we're a nation of shoppers, and perhaps this two fingers to the daddy of them all is our retail version of the Arab spring. Watching the suddenly humble Clarke promising to address product quality, customer service and "longstanding business issues" rather put one in mind of a besieged dictator. "Wait!" is the despot's reaction to increasingly volatile protests. "I am literally just about to introduce a raft of democratic reforms!"

It will take rather more than Clarke's needy mea culpa to reverse the perception that Tesco stands for everything that is monolithic, mercilessly expansionist, and machine driven. Tesco is a place that people more principled than myself probably manage to avoid entirely, but into which most of us feel compelled to go fairly frequently because it's nearby, or because it has effectively shut down any alternatives.

For a long time, criticism of it was crushed by that pat little assertion that it was "what the people wanted". Tesco executives and their defenders appeared to be graduates of the Richard Desmond school of debate, which is to paint anyone who questions your methods as snobs or enemies of enterprise. They acted as if everyone criticising Tesco must have the luxury of shopping at Waitrose or M&S, when this week's evidence has revealed that they might just as easily get their goods at Aldi or Lidl.

Thus the unthinkable has happened. And now that Tesco appears to be not so much what the people want, what precisely does it have going for it?

Its expansion has certainly told us little we did not already know about this septic isle, merely throwing into even sharper relief the iniquities of such institutions as council planning departments. Countless ordinary citizens have tales of their applications to make minuscule home improvements being rejected, while mock Tudor Tesco superstores are waved through with as many clock towers and metal-effect weather vanes as their architects care to spike them with. Since the 90s, 200 have been plonked down like spaceships, pulling customers off high streets with their seemingly irresistible tractor beams. Yet we now discover that these behemoths are among the "less potent" parts of Tesco's enterprise. Whether scarcely 15 years of rapacious profits was worth leaving a blight of potential white elephants scattered across the countryside, only time will show.

But it is in the area of employment, and its effect on customer service, that the Tesco modus operandi has been most pernicious. There are few sights in modern retail more pathetic, in the true sense of that word, than that of the lone, low-paid human charged with overriding technical glitches in the banks of self-service tills that have already claimed the jobs of countless check-out assistants, knowing that they will soon enough claim theirs. (Eighteen months ago, Tesco began trialling a stall with no manned checkouts at all, merely the single overseer.) Given the Japanese government is investing heavily in technology that could provide robot care for the elderly, it seems a likely bet that Tesco hopes one day to have its shelves robotically stacked, and even the automated till supervisors replaced by customer service droids. A similar process of dehumanisation has been afoot in car plants, but few of us have the occasion to pass through those very often. Nowhere is the rise of the machine at the expense of human employment more evident than in supermarkets such as Tesco. It is an everyday dystopia.

What is to be done? Oddly enough, perhaps one mad answer lies in the other Tesco-related story of the week. Just possibly – and obviously entirely unwittingly – shoplifting chef Antony Worrall Thompson has suggested an act of civil disobedience. If a critical mass of shoppers were to decide to do a Wozza for moral reasons, then the robotic scanners would become less economically viable than human checkout workers. Pilfering from Tesco would become a political act. However, if your preference is for grandiose schemes that won't involve accepting a police caution before embarking on psychiatric treatment, perhaps we could get up a campaign for a sort of Tesco Tobin tax, in which some tiny percentage of every penny spent in one of their out-of-town stores would be dedicated to reviving Britain's denuded high streets.

That, of course, is about as likely to happen as one of Tesco's machines accepting you've placed your 25g packet of parsley in the bagging area. Alas, Britain's biggest retailer is such a massive part of our economy that it presumably won't be long before someone is explaining that it is too big to fail, in keeping with the vogue for the most rampant capitalists becoming socialists in their many hours of need.

Nothing wrong in killing; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses.

Robert Fisk: This is not about 'bad apples'. This is the horror of war

How many other abuses took place off camera? How many Hadithas? How many My Lais?

Robert Fisk

Friday, 13 January 2012

So now it's snapshots of US Marines pissing on the Afghan dead. Better, I suppose, than the US soldiers pictured beside the innocent Afghan teenager they fragged back in March of last year. Or the female guard posing with the dead Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Not to mention Haditha or the murder videos taken by US troops in the field – the grenading of an old shepherd by an Iraqi highway comes to mind – or My Lai or the massacre of refugees by US forces in Korea or the murder of Malayan villagers by British troops. Or the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 Catholics by British troops in Derry in 1972. And please note, I have not even mentioned the name of Baha Mousa.

The US Marines' response to the pissing pictures was oh so typical. These men were not abiding by the "core values" of the Marines, we were informed. Same old story. A "rogue" unit, a few "bad apples", rotten eggs. Maybe.

But if there is one game of pissing on the dead, how many others happened without pictures? How many other shepherds got fragged in Iraq? How many other Hadithas have there been? There were plenty of other My Lais.

As laptop filmography gets better, so it all comes slopping out, the rapes and slaughter – and yes, by the Taliban the stoning of young women for supposed sexual misconduct in Afghanistan; by al-Qa'ida, executions and throat-cuttings in Iraq.

And no – the Americans are not the Nazis, the Brits are not the French Paras of 1960 Algeria (but surely we're not comparing the French paras to the Nazis). The Canadians handed prisoners over to Afghan thugs for brutal questioning but the Canadians are not like Saddam's secret police – and, I suppose, the Taliban are not Stalin's NKVD or Putin's KGB (before he became a statesman). And you can't compare – surely – the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in 1979 with Genghis Khan.

So let's take a little guessing game. A British Sunday paper reveals shocking revelations of torture and cigarette burning, of physical brutality where prisoners must be hospitalised for a week, of possible electric torture. The French in Algeria? Saddam's mukhabarat? Nope. It's The Sunday Times Insight Team's report of 7 May 1972; the victims, of course, IRA suspects in Belfast. A "rogue" unit? A "few bad apples"? I doubt it.

When the Gloucestershire Regiment went on a rampage near Divis flats, smashing every window in the street the day before they were due to leave Belfast, the line was changed. They had been under "enormous strain" – but weren't these the "Glorious Gloucesters" of Imjin River fame? And the killer Paras of Derry – weren't these the same Paras of Arnhem Bridge?

And so we go on. Yes, British troops murdered SS prisoners after Normandy – just as the Red Army did in the Second World War and the Americans. And all this gets a bit dull, doesn't it?

Dresden was worse than the Blitz – but who started it? Hiroshima was worse than Pearl Harbour (ditto). The Canadians bayoneted German prisoners in the First World War – but the Germans really did committed atrocities in Belgium in 1914. And what about Waterloo? What did we do with the heaps of French dead? Why, we honoured them by shipping their corpses off to Lincolnshire and using them as manure on the fields of East Anglia.

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.
And how should armies react? With one word: guilty.

Skyscrapers 'linked with impending financial crashes'

There is an "unhealthy correlation" between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital.

Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was underway, and the current world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust.

China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said.
India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.

"Often the world's tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction," Barclays Capital analysts said.

The bank noted that the world's first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building in New York, was completed in 1873 and coincided with a five-year recession. It was demolished in 1912.

Other examples include Chicago's Willis Tower (which was formerly known as the Sears Tower) in 1974, just as there was an oil shock and the US dollar's peg to gold was abandoned.

And Malaysia's Petronas Towers in 1997, which coincided with the Asian financial crisis.

The findings might be a concern for Londoners, who are currently seeing the construction of what will be Western Europe's tallest building, the Shard.

That will be 1,017ft (310m) tall on completion.

China bubble?

Investors should be most concerned about China, which is currently building 53% of all the tall buildings in the world, the bank said.

A lending boom following the global financial crisis in 2008 pushed prices higher in the world's second largest economy.

In a separate report, JPMorgan Chase said that the Chinese property market could drop by as much as 20% in value in the country's major cities within the next 12 to 18 months.

In India, billionaire Mukesh Ambani built his own skyscraper in Mumbai - a 27-storey residence believed to be the world's most expensive home.

Local newspapers said the house required 600 members of staff to maintain it. Reports suggest the residence is worth more than $1bn (£630m).

"Today India has only two of the world's 276 skyscrapers over 240m in height, yet over the next five years it intends to complete 14 new skyscrapers," according to Barclays Capital.

Barclays Capital's Skyscraper Index has been published every year since 1999.

It's time to cancel unpayable old debts

By Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

In the week between Christmas and New Year, those bleary few days when the world has better things to do than catch up on news or check its Twitter account, The Guardian carried a story that bears repeating. It was about Dimitris and Christina Gasparinatos and their kids in the Greek port of Patras. For ever hard up, the parents had been pushed by the economic crisis into outright poverty; and just before Christmas Dimitris and Christina put four of their children into care.

Nor is the Gasparinatos' case an isolated one. Greece must be the most family-centric society in western Europe, yet its media is full of reports of newborns dumped outside clinics, or infants shunted into foster homes.

Such stories almost never come up when politicians and economists debate Europe's meltdown; implicitly, they are categorised as fall-out, for journalists and campaigners to highlight. Yet the abandoned children of Greece are not merely coincidental to those discussions about how to tackle the debt; they are integral to it.

Strip away the technicalities and you are left with two ways to think about the debt crisis. One is as a battle between the past and the future. The vast majority of Greece's debts are historic commitments made to creditors by previous governments, sometimes in very dubious circumstances. Yet Athens has been forced to prioritise repaying these old loans over generating economic growth, or future income. One result of that policy has been to snatch away whatever chance the Gasparinatos kids might have had of decent lives.

Something similar is happening in Britain. David Cameron came to office with the primary goal of paying down debt. Less than two years later, his ministers are now obliged to go on the BBC at regular intervals to explain why more than a million young people are out of work. Study after study shows that a young adult unemployed at the outset of his or her career suffers permanent damage to their prospects, yet this government's economic policy favours the past even though it means ruining the future.

Why? This brings us to the second way to think about any argument over debt: as a fight between creditors and borrowers, or the haves and the have-nots. The creditors have the money and therefore the whip-hand over the borrowers. They also have the political influence: the boss of Deutsche Bank would, one suspects, get more face time with Greece's prime minister or any other eurozone leader than the Gasparinatos family and a whole coachload of their neighbours. His demands are also more likely to get preferential treatment, which is a major reason why Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy has gone through such contortions over Athens' loans.

Before last summer, eurozone policy-makers swore blind that they would never countenance Greece failing to pay all of its debts in full. After finally accepting that that was impossible, they then asked if bankers would be good enough to knock 21% off the country's loans, rising over time to 40% and then 50%, or even a little more. Meanwhile, economists at the IMF estimate that Greece should actually have 75% wiped off its debt burden – and market prices indicate that figure should really be over 90%. But economic reality has been no match for the stranglehold bankers have on European politicians – who, by the way, swore last month that no other country would fail to pay its loans in full.

And yet economic history is full of examples of successful debt default. When American Airlines declared recently that it was bankrupt and couldn't carry on repaying its loans, it was applauded by Wall Street analysts as "very smart". The whole point of company insolvencies is to work out the value and viability of the underlying enterprise; if it can carry on, banks and other creditors get squared off at vastly reduced sums and the productive part of the firm is back in business.

The same goes for countries. Regimes sunk by revolutions don't repay their debts; nor do countries that lose wars. (When they are made to, as with Germany after the first world war, terrible things can result.) Over the past couple of decades, campaigners have successfully won debt relief for poor countries in Africa and Asia. Other nations, such as Ecuador or Argentina or Iceland, have simply declared they cannot repay all that they owe.

Ultimately, a loan is a social arrangement and, like any other contract, it can be renegotiated. A few decades ago, archaeologists discovered the first ever legal contract in Lagash in modern-day Iraq. Dated back 4,400 years and carved into the bricks of a Mesopotamian temple, it was for the cancellation of debt. It's claimed that countries that don't repay their loans will be frozen out by lenders. Yet, as I wrote here last year, IMF economists have recently argued that "the economic costs are generally significant but short-lived . . . we almost never can detect effects beyond one or two years."

In his recent, brilliant history Debt: the First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber calls for a modern-day debt jubilee, a cancellation of all debts, just as they had in Mesopotamia. His suggestion is provocative, but it should be taken seriously. Because the longer we keep protecting the haves over the have-nots and honouring the past while destroying the future, the worse this debt crisis will get.

Is this Prosperity for Real?

By Pritish Nandy

Despite the economic downturn there remain clear signs of growing prosperity all around us. Almost every week someone or the other walks into my office wanting to make a movie and ready to pay for it. It was like this ever since I entered this profession. But earlier, people came with a few lakhs, a script, a camera and an autograph book. Now they come with ten or twenty crores.

Most of them come from remote towns and states, where they claim to have made a neat fortune in some business they are not ready to disclose details about. Others come, having sold off some ancestral land or property. They turn up in Mumbai with big dreams of making movies and doubling or tripling their wealth. When I warn them it’s not that easy, many go away with disbelief. Most times I turn them back because they come with cash. They are surprised when I tell them that the real guys who make movies in this town do not deal in cash any more. Only hustlers do.

But what never ceases to surprise me is the amount of wealth that actually exists in India. It is possibly because once you are a few miles out of the main cities, no one really bothers about things like taxes. Life is simpler. You neither hire CAs nor do you bump into tax officers. You simply do your business and get ahead with life. I seriously doubt how many of the rich guys out there actually bank their wealth. They put their profits back into land and property or gold and, now, increasingly into fancy SUVs and a lifestyle that they see in television serials and movies. That’s what defines their ambitions.

But yes, prosperity exists in certain pockets and it’s clearly growing. Much of this prosperity comes from two things: Inflation and the selling of family assets that the young generation is no longer keen to hold. So the wealth you see is not actually created, as all real wealth ought to be. It is wealth that is generated from the falling value of the rupee and the rising cost of land and property. It is, in that sense, illusory. For the amount of money you get from selling a family asset once acquired in thousands and now being sold in crores is not really all that much as it may appear. The crores you now get have the same purchasing power as the few thousands that were once paid to acquire that very asset. It is the value of the rupee that has fallen. So these crores will not fetch you much more than what those thousands could have fetched your grandfather. And those who sell those assets ultimately find them irreplaceable and the huge pile of cash they get is blown up quicker than they imagine, on a trashy lifestyle that they think will upgrade the quality of their life. It never does. But you realise that only after the money disappears.

That is the danger with unearned wealth. It disappears as swiftly as it comes. And because you never made the effort to acquire the skills required to earn that money, you are unlikely to know how and where to spend it in a way that can actually enhance the magic of your life. That leaves you worse off than where you began. At least you had the assets then. Now you are left with nothing.

I see this happening all around me. Suddenly people become rich and then equally suddenly, they become poor again. In between there’s a lot of selling and buying and selling that takes place but seldom the creation of any real wealth. It’s always land, property, gold, and family heirlooms that have appreciated in value over the years. When you sell them, you sell your past without acquiring a real future. People who talked in thousands begin to talk in lakhs and people who talked in lakhs now talk in crores. But they are talking about the same things. It is just that some extra zeroes have been added to the numbers and no one quite knows why.

But one thing is certain: When old assets become central to the idea of creating wealth, it means we have lost our skills in knowing how to build new ones. All we are relying on is inflation, and inflation just grows the numbers but never gives you anything more in real terms. Certainly not a better life.

Elite Asian students cheat like mad on US college applications

By Patrick Winn

Created 1969-12-31 19:00

BANGKOK, Thailand — From sleep to social lives, there is little Asia’s most upwardly mobile students won’t sacrifice for education. Though they belong to the so-called “Asian Century,” American colleges remain the premier destination for the elite from Shanghai to Singapore to Seoul.
The path to US college acceptance, however, increasingly compels students to sacrifice their integrity. For the right price, unscrupulous college prep agencies offer ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even whiz kids for hire who’ll pose as the applicant for SAT exams.

“Oh my God, they can do everything for you,” said Nok, 17-year-old Thai senior in her final year at a private Bangkok high school. (She asked GlobalPost to alter her name for this article.) “They can take the SAT for you, no problem. Most students don’t really think it’s wrong.”
 
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Among Asian high society, and particularly in China, parents’ obsession with sending their offspring to US colleges has given rise to a lucrative trade of application brokers. Depending the degree of assistance, families can expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000.

“The parent says, ‘My kid needs this GPA but, frankly, his scores aren’t that strong.’ Then the unscrupulous agent says ‘Don’t worry. We’ll figure that out,’” said Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China and author of a Chinese-language book on choosing American colleges.

A 250-student survey by Zinch China, a Beijing wing of the California-based Zinch education consultancy, suggests college application fraud among Chinese students is extremely pervasive. According to the survey, roughly 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.
“For the right price,” Melcher said, “the agent will either fabricate it or work with the school to get a different transcript issued.” Admission into a top 10 or top 30 school, as defined by the US News & World Report, can bring a $3,000 to $10,000 bonus for the agent, he said. The magazine, Melcher said, is commonly confused in China for an official government publication.

Demand for such agents is high and getting higher. Rapid economic growth across China and other parts of Asia has sparked an explosion in foreign students hoping to secure their ascent with a Western diploma.

Chinese citizens currently account for more than one in five foreign students studying at US colleges. Nearly 158,000 Chinese students are enrolled at any given time, a full 300 percent jump over mid-1990s numbers, according to the Institute of International Education.

Chinese, Indian and South Korean students comprise roughly half of America’s foreign college student population. Vietnam has sent 13 percent more students to the US within the last year, and Malaysia has added 8 percent, the institute reports.

But many American college officials are oblivious to the application fix-it men these foreign students may have paid back home. Worse yet, remaining blind to the deception is often financially incentivized.

America’s economic downturn has drained the state tax coffers that provide a funding lifeline to many US colleges. Many schools have resorted to unpopular tuition hikes. But many are also courting wealthy foreign students whose families gladly fork over money for housing and tuition along with out-of-state or even out-of-country fees.
 
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“International students are seen as a source of revenue ... and the trend has exploded in the past two years,” said Dale Gough, international education director for AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Foreign students, through tuition and living expenses, contribute $2.1 billion to the US economy, according to the US Commerce Department. “In short,” Gough said, “they help the bottom line.”
Excuses abound for ignoring fraudulent applications, Gough said. Some assume that kids who cheat will inevitably flame out anyway and never score a degree. Some admissions officers, he said, contend that “that’s just the way it’s done over there.”

Many schools also make sloppy attempts to translate foreign transcripts, calculated by an “indigenous” and unfamiliar methodology, into America’s GPA or “grade point average” system, Gough said.

His association publishes a guide to deciphering foreign scores, the only one of its kind, but fewer than 500 of the 3,500 institutions represented by AACRAO bother to buy a copy.
“Translating foreign grades into a GPA system is meaningless,” Gough said. “They attempt to do it anyway.”

Gough fears that universities’ lax standards, and focus on big foreign tuition payments, will eventually undermine the pedigree of an American diploma. The damage, he said, would be nearly impossible to undo.

“This scenario spells disaster,” Gough said. “Even if a lot of the students who cheat are bright, and they go on to succeed, is this fair to American students? Or [to] the foreign students who play by the rules?”

While America has ceded manufacturing power and foreign influence to China, an American degree remains the gold standard of educational prestige. Nok, who is currently applying for colleges abroad, never considered applying to universities in Asia.

“Students who study in America are elite, the privileged,” said Nok. “It shows you’re smarter than the others.”

But like most Asian students, Nok has felt baffled and overwhelmed by America’s complex application system.

“Here, you take a big test one day and report the score. That’s how you figure out where you’ll go to college,” she said. “The Americans are different. They want to know the big picture. All these essays. All this stuff about your life.”

America’s liberal arts application system is “fundamentally more confusing,” said Joshua Russo, director of Top Scholars, a college prep and tutoring agency in Bangkok.

Asian families unfamiliar with the process, he said, are justified in seeking an agency’s help with application strategies and tutoring to build the skills US colleges demand. But Russo’s refrain to parents, he said, is that kids who can’t write their own essays are likely to burn out once enrolled in America.

“Some consultants will promise the world ... and they’re fundamentally preparing students to fail,” Russo said. “Beyond fabricating an essay, they’re fabricating a whole life story. Students will start to believe in the lie. It’s wrong.”

The allure of America’s universities, and the pressure-cooker drive to succeed among Asia’s expanding upper class, will continue to propel Asian students into American schools. Many Chinese teenagers applying abroad, Melcher said, are the sort of highly motivated students colleges desire.
“Chinese kids are typically great,” Melcher said. “They’re not at the tailgate parties drinking. They’re busting their butts. Failure is not an option.”

But college application fraud will continue, he said, so long as the risks are low and the rewards are so high. His consultancy suggests interviewing all Chinese students via online video chats, conducting spot tests in English, and hiring a mainland Chinese staffer in the college’s home office.
“Frankly, I feel really bad for Chinese families who are trying to be honest,” he said. “They’re driving 55 while everyone’s zooming past them. After a while, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Fine, I’ll speed up.’”