Showing off or innovation? – Stir over MBA exclusive class for second-generation rich

By Zhang Dongya

Sanyuan Foreign Languages School, a private school in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, has set up an MBA class for senior high school students. Its special curriculum and exorbitant tuition fees have again drawn the public’s attention to the “second-generation rich.”

Some people have developed a hostile attitude toward the moneyed class, but more than this, the issue has made people reassess the country’s education system and the perks available to the few.

The first 11 students in Sanyuan Foreign Languages School’s MBA class started their lessons on Septembe 1. All of them were from well-to-do families, with parents hugely successful in fields such as real estate and mining, the Chongqing Evening Post reported.

Their curriculum varies from that of ordinary high school students’: it includes studying the Four Books and Five Classics, a classic text on Confucianism; learning changquan, a type of martial art; and cooking lessons in practical education class.

The class was designed as a top-quality program for the international market. The school began recruiting students in June, and decided to start holding lessons even with only three or four students. To the administration’s surprise, about 30 studens signed up.

They conducted interviews, with both the student and his or her parents present, then picked 11 students. Wang Jinsong, director of Sanyuan’s international department, told Chengdu Business Daily the school gave more weight to the student-parent interview than the students’ test scores.

Students were charged an annual tuition fee of 70,000 yuan for the specially designed curriculum. It is said to include an opportunity for further studies abroad, with the aim of cultivating society’s future “elites.”

Sanyuan is not the first school to open an MBA class for high school students: there are others in various parts of the country that have created special curriculums and charge similarly high tuition fees.

This distinct education system reminds people of “quality-oriented education” in the 1990s, which aimed to foster students’ holistic development and wasrkedly different from the traditional exam-oriented system. However, the steep tuition fees limited its reach to wealthy families.