Student Union
What Was it Like to be a Chinese Student in 19th Century America?
“This group of boys, dressed in silk gowns, their queues flapping, was too much for New Englanders, be they small-town folk or city dwellers, to ignore. In Springfield, for example, the boys’ dinner at a local hotel was interrupted when an American woman, dining at a nearby table, stood up and wordlessly approached the Chinese youths and started dreamily fondling their queues … They were less amused a few days later when, while visiting Hartford, American children chased them down the street, pushing and shoving each other for a better glimpse of the strange, new breed of humans that had arrived on their shores. … The more fearful among them recalled the horrific stories circulated back home about Americans and their desire to turn the Chinese boys into sideshow curiosities.”
In 1872, when 30 Chinese students arrived on America’s east coast as part of an educational program sponsored by the Chinese government, they attracted quite a bit of attention.
They weren't the first to study in the area though. The first Chinese student ever to receive a degree in the U.S. was Yung Wing, who came to America for high school in 1847 and received his diploma from Yale University in 1852. Yung then spearheaded an educational mission to send 120 Chinese boys to study in the U.S. for 15 years, arriving in dispatches of 30 per year.
What would it have been like to be one of those Chinese students in the 1800s?
Part of the answer can be found in letters and diaries kept by the students, which authors Leil Leibovitz and Matthew Miller used to write a book called Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization.
“We were amazed to find how meticulous these men had been about documenting their lives,” Leibovitz said about writing the book. “So you really just had to open the boxes, which to my amazement and great fortune, no one had thought of doing in the century that passed.”
Yung Wing also published a memoir recounting his experience, as did Li En Fu, one of the 120 to participate in the educational mission.
Here, in their own words, is how Chinese students experienced 19th century America.
How did they apply?
Here’s how students apply today.
Yung Wing wrote in his memoir, My Life in China and America, that he was attending the first English school in China when he got a unique opportunity:
“[Schoolmaster Rev. S.R. Brown] left China in the winter of 1846. Four months before he left, he one day sprang a surprise upon the whole school. He told of his contemplated return to America on account of his health and the health of his family. Before closing his remarks by telling us of his deep interest in the school, he said he would like to take a few of his old pupils home with him to finish their education in the United States … When he requested those who wished to accompany him to the States to signify it by rising, I was the first one on my feet.”
The 120 boys who followed him in 1872 had rather a different experience.
In When I Was a Boy in China Li En Fu recalled, “A school was established at Shanghai to receive candidates, and announcement made that the government had appropriated a large sum or money to educate one hundred and twenty boys in America, who were to be sent in four detachments …”
“… I was taken to the Tung Mim Kuen, or Government School, where I was destined to spend a whole year, preparatory to my American education … It was afternoon, and the Chinese lessons were being recited. … At half-past four o’clock, school was out and the boys, to the number of forty, went forth to play. They ran around, chased each other and wasted their cash on fruits and confections. …
After breakfast the following morning we assembled in the same schoolroom to study our English lessons. The teacher of this branch was a Chinese gentleman who learned his English at Hongkong. The first thing to be done with me was to teach me the alphabet. … It took me two days to learn them. The letter R was the hardest one to pronounce, but I soon learned to give it, with a peculiar roll of the tongue even. … A year thus passed in study and pastime. Sundays were given to us to spend as holidays.
It was in the month of May when we were examined in our English studies and the best thirty were selected to go to America, their proficiency in Chinese, their general deportment and their record also being taken into account.”
According to Ning Qian in his book Chinese Students Encounter America, “The parents of the first group of 30 boys sent to America in 1872 had to sign an agreement to 'accept the will of destiny should the child become ill or die' during the study.”
How did they get there?
Here’s how it’s done today.
In the 1800s, the only way to get from China to America would have been by boat. Yung described his journey like this:
“The tops of the masts and ends of the yards were tipped with balls of electricity. The strong wind was howling and whistling behind us like a host of invisible Furies. The night was pitch dark and the electric balls dancing on the tips of the yards and tops of the masts, back and forth and from side to side like so many infernal lanterns in the black night, presented a spectacle never to be forgotten by me. … We landed in New York on the 12th of April, 1847, after a passage of ninety-eight days of unprecendented fair weather.”
Li arrived by boat to San Francisco, which “impressed my young imagination with its lofty buildings – their solidity and elegance. … But the 'modern conveniences' of gas and running water and electric bells and elevators were what excited wonder and stimulated investigation.”
To get to New England, where he was going to study, he had to take a train – the transcontinental railroad, completed only a few years earlier (and built, ironically, largely by Chinese laborers):
“Nothing occurred on our Eastward journey to mar the enjoyment of our first ride on the steamcars – excepting a train robbery, a consequent smash-up of the engine, and the murder of the engineer. We were quietly looking out of the windows and gazing at the seemingly interminable prairies when the train suddenly bounded backward, then rushed forward a few feet, and, then meeting some resistance, started back again. Then all was confusion and terror. Pistol-shots could be made out above the cries of frightened passengers. Women shrieked and babies cried. Our party, teachers and pupils, jumped from our seats in dismay and looked out through the windows for more light on the subject. What we saw was enough to make our hair stand on end. Two ruffianly men held a revolver in each hand and seemed to be taking aim at us from the short distance of forty feet or thereabouts. Our teachers told us to crouch down for our lives. …
In half an hour the agony and suspense were over. A brakeman rushed through with a lamp in his hand. He told us that the train had been robbed of its gold bricks, by five men, three of whom, dressed like Indians, rifled the baggage car while the others held the passengers at bay; that the engine was hopelessly wrecked, the engineer killed; that the robbers had escaped on horseback with their booty; and that men had been sent to the nearest telegraph station to “wire” for another engine and a supply of workmen. One phase of American civilization was thus indelibly fixed upon our minds.”
When he finally arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, Li was assigned to a host mother, who “put her arms around me and kissed me. This made the rest of the boys laugh, and perhaps I got rather red in the face ; however, I would say nothing to show my embarrassment. But that was the first kiss I ever had had since my infancy.”
What were their studies like?
Here’s what it’s like today.
When Yung graduated from his American high school, he applied to continue his studies at Yale University. He found the academic requirements there fairly stringent:
“How I got in, I do not know, as I had had only fifteen months of Latin and twelve months of Greek, and ten months of mathematics … But I was convinced I was not sufficiently prepared, as my recitations in the class-room clearly proved. Between the struggle of how to make ends meet financially and how to keep up with the class in my studies, I had a pretty tough time of it. I used to sweat over my studies till twelve o’clock every night the whole Freshman year.”
Yung wrote to a friend, “One has no time to think or analyze except study. There is also great excitement among the students themselves…mental excitement … I enjoy its influence very much.”
The boys who came as part of the educational mission lived with American families during their high school years and, according to Leibovitz and Miller, student Y.T. Woo called his host mother:
“... a strict disciplinarian. When we held our knives and forks too low at meals, she would correct us. When she heard us talking in our rooms in the attic after nine or ten p.m., she would shout from below, ‘Boys, stop talking, it is time to sleep.’”
The students were required to attend classes in Chinese language and culture on top of their normal academics, including during summer holidays. But it wasn’t all work. Leibovitz and Miller quoted an American classmate as saying that “at dances and receptions, the fairest and most sought-out belles invariably gave the swains from the Orient the preference.”
And an American student told this story about classmate Chung Mun Yew’s time as coxswain of Yale’s crew team:
“He was told he must swear at the oarsmen to make them row their best; for he usually sat in his place in silence. Swearing did not come naturally to him, for he was grave and impassive; but finally, being told he must curse them, he would, at the most unexpected moments, and without any emphasis mechanically utter the monosyllable “damn!” whereat the crew became so helpless with laughter, they begged him to desist.” (Leibovitz and Miller)
What was it like when they went home?
Here's what it's like today.
After being in America for over 6 years, Yung experienced some serious culture shock on the way home:
“As we approached Hong Kong, a Chinese pilot boarded us. The captain wanted me to ask him whether there were any dangerous rocks and shoals nearby. I could not for the life of me recall my Chinese in order to interpret for him … So the skipper and Macy, and a few other persons who were present at the time, had the laugh on me, who, being a Chinese, yet was not able to speak the language.”
And, like many modern students, when Yung saw his mother again after so much time away, he had to endure some motherly nagging:
“The interview seemed to give her great comfort and satisfaction. She seemed very happy over it. After it was ended, she looked at me with a significant smile and said, 'I see you have already raised your mustaches. You know you have a brother who is much older than you are; he hasn’t grown his mustaches yet. You must have yours off.' I promptly obeyed her mandate, and as I entered the room with a clean face, she smiled with intense satisfaction, evidently thinking that with all my foreign education, I had not lost my early training of being obedient to my mother.”
The return of Li En Fu and the other boys who participated in the educational mission was a bit different. The politics of the day led to them being recalled to China early, where, upon their arrival, they spent several days in prison on suspicion of being spies.
Books:
Leil Leibovitz and Matthew Miller, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization
Yung Wing (sometimes written Wing Yung), My Life in China and America
Yan Phou Lee (different spelling for Li En Fu), When I Was a Boy in China
Ning Qian (trans. T.K. Chu), Chinese Students Encounter America
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Grace period for US student loan payments is over. Here's what you need to know
The 12-month grace period for student loan borrowers ended on September 30. The "on-ramp" period helped borrowers who are struggling to make payments avoid the risk of defaulting and hurting their credit score.
"The end of the on-ramp period means the beginning of the potentially harsh consequences for student loan borrowers who are not able to make payments," said Persis Yu, Deputy Executive Director at the Student Borrower Protection Center.
Around 43 million Americans have student loan debt, amounting to $1.5 trillion. Around eight million of those borrowers had enrolled in the SAVE plan, the newest income-driven repayment plan that extended the eligibility for borrowers to have affordable monthly student loan payments. However, this plan is currently on hold due to legal challenges.
With the on-ramp period and a separate program known as Fresh Start ending and the SAVE plan on hold, student loan borrowers who are struggling to afford their monthly payments have fewer options, added Yu. Student loan borrowers who haven't been able to afford their monthly payments must consider their options to avoid going into default.
If you have student loans, here's what you need to know.
What was the on-ramp period?
The Education Department implemented this grace period to ease the borrower's transition to make payments after a three-year payment pause during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this year-long period, borrowers were encouraged to keep making payments since interest continued to accumulate.
"Normally, loans will default if you fall about nine months behind on making payments, but during this on-ramp period, missed payments would not move people towards defaulting and then being subject to forced collections. However, if you missed payments, you still be falling behind ultimately on repaying your loans," said Abby Shaforth, director of National Consumer Law Center's Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project.
Since this grace period has ended, student loan borrowers who don't make payments will go delinquent or, if their loans are not paid for nine months, go into default.
Borrowers who cannot afford to make payments can apply for deferment or forbearance, which pause payments, though interest continues to accrue.
What happens if I don't make my payments?
Borrowers who can't or don't pay risk delinquency and eventually default. That can badly hurt your credit rating and make you ineligible for additional aid and government benefits.
If a borrower missed one month's payment, they will start receiving email notifications, said Shaforth. Once the loan hasn't been paid for three months, loan servicers notify to the credit reporting agencies that the loan is delinquent, affecting your credit history. Once the borrower hasn't paid the loan for nine months, the loan goes into default.
If you're struggling to pay, advisers first encourage you to check if you qualify for an income-driven repayment plan, which determines your payments by looking at your expenses. You can see whether you qualify by visiting the Federal Student Aid website. If you've worked for a government agency or a non-profit organization, you could also be eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which forgives student debt after 10 years.
What happens when a loan goes into default?
When you fall behind on a loan by 270 days — roughly nine months — the loan appears on your credit report as being in default.
Once a loan is in default, it goes into collections. This means the government can garnish wages (without a court order) to go towards paying back the loan, intercept tax refunds, and seize portions of Social Security checks and other benefit payments.
What if I can't pay?
If your budget doesn't allow you to resume payments, it's important to know how to navigate the possibility of default and delinquency on a student loan. Both can hurt your credit rating, which would make you ineligible for additional aid.
If you're in a short-term financial bind, you may qualify for deferment or forbearance — allowing you to temporarily suspend payment.
To determine whether deferment or forbearance are good options for you, you can contact your loan servicer. One thing to note: interest still accrues during deferment or forbearance. Both can also impact potential loan forgiveness options. Depending on the conditions of your deferment or forbearance, it may make sense to continue paying the interest during the payment suspension.
What is an income-driven repayment plan?
The U.S. Education Department offers several plans for repaying federal student loans. Under the standard plan, borrowers are charged a fixed monthly amount that ensures all their debt will be repaid after 10 years. But if borrowers have difficulty paying that amount, they can enroll in one of several plans that offer lower monthly payments based on income and family size. Those are known as income-driven repayment plans.
Income-driven options have been offered for years and generally cap monthly payments at 10% of a borrower's discretionary income. If a borrower's earnings are low enough, their bill is reduced to $0. And after 20 or 25 years, any remaining debt gets erased.
What is the latest with the SAVE program?
In August, the Supreme Court kept on hold the SAVE plan, the income-driven repayment plan that would have lowered payments for millions of borrowers, while lawsuits make their way through lower courts.
Eight million borrowers who had already enrolled in the SAVE plan don't have to pay their monthly student loan bills until the court case is resolved. Debt that already had been forgiven under the plan was unaffected.
The next court hearing about this case will be held on October 15.
What happened with the Fresh Start program?
The Fresh Start program, which gave benefits to borrowers who were delinquent prior to the pandemic payment pause, also closed on September 30. During this limited program, student loan borrowers who were in default prior to the pandemic were given the opportunity to remove their loans from default, allowing them to enroll in income-driven payment plans, or apply for deferment, among other benefits.
Boston university relaunches journalism curriculum to encompass humanities
As the fall semester begins, a women’s college in Boston, Massachusetts, has retooled its media-related curriculum to best reflect the ideals of the school’s namesake, the late journalist Gwen Ifill.
Simmons University announced it would relaunch the media school as the Gwen Ifill School of Media, Humanities and Social Sciences. A search committee also named media scholar Ammina Kothari as the new dean.
The Ifill School’s new structure expands its media curriculum to include humanities and social sciences. The attributes that defined Ifill also shape a new, holistic approach, “An unwavering commitment to accuracy and objectivity, a nuanced understanding of social and historical context and a compassion-based appreciation of policymaking’s real-world implications,” according to a Simmons press release.
“Folks here are very proud of Gwen’s legacy and want to honor it in many different ways,” said Bert Ifill, Gwen’s brother and a longtime university administrator.
A crucial component of the Ifill School is its emphasis on communications, a field Gwen excelled in, Bert told VOA.
After graduating from Simmons in 1977, she had long careers in both print and television journalism, working for The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and PBS. She covered seven presidential campaigns and died in 2016 at age 61.
Ifill was the first African American woman to moderate a vice presidential debate and to coanchor a national newscast, “PBS NewsHour.”
“Gwen valued storytelling, and she was an amazing journalist,” Kothari, the school’s new dean, told VOA. “But she also worked really hard to raise awareness about important social issues and to highlight underrepresented voices.”
Abigail Meyers, a current junior at the Ifill School, admires the journalist’s “groundbreaking work” in both journalism and racial justice, she told VOA. Raised near Baltimore, Maryland, Meyers feels a special connection to Ifill’s work for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper.
The school has been instrumental in supporting Meyers’ aspirations to become a professional journalist, she told VOA.
“The support that you get from the faculty and alumni is unlike really any other journalism program,” she said.
Being a double major in communications and political science, Meyers appreciates the new curriculum’s flexibility, as she is able to take classes across different disciplines.
This flexibility will help prime Simmons’ students to achieve success, Kothari said. She believes interdisciplinary training leads to stronger leaders in the world.
“As we think about communications or media, including journalism or social sciences, we need a strong foundation in humanities to understand the historical context for what we see happening today,” Kothari said.
The school’s increased focus on humanities “couldn’t be more timely,” according to the press release. Nearly three of four Americans believe media literacy is an important skill in today’s news landscape, a 2023 Boston University survey found.
However, humanities-focused degree programs like the Ifill School’s receive little recognition. Of all the bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2020, humanities degrees made up less than 10%, a number that has only been decreasing, according to a 2022 MIT study. Meanwhile, science, technology, engineering and math degrees, or STEM, have grown exponentially.
But humanities and STEM shouldn’t be seen as opposites, Kothari said.
She cited the COVID-19 pandemic response as an example. Many precautionary measures such as social distancing were grounded in “amazing scientific research,” but weren’t effectively communicated to the public, she said.
“As we have new knowledge being produced, we also need journalists,” Kothari said. “We need communicators who are able to translate very complex information to the audience so they can see, ‘How does it matter to me? What is the effect for me?’”
Ifill’s legacy is not only celebrated within her namesake school, but also through press freedom organizations around the world.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom nonprofit, honors Ifill with the annual Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, which is presented to individuals who have “shown extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom,” according to CPJ’s website.
Christophe Deloire, the late director of international media freedom organization Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, received the 2024 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award.
“Christophe was one of journalism's greatest-ever champions,” RSF Executive Director Clayton Weimers told VOA in an email. “There was hardly a fight or an advance in press freedom in the past decade that he wasn't a part of, if not leading.”
As Ifill’s legacy spreads, there is one person who couldn’t be prouder: her brother, Bert. He told VOA it often seems as though his full-time job is “to talk nicely about Gwen.”
“It's always a great pleasure and honor for me to talk about her and to talk about her legacy, not only as obviously a very skilled journalist, but as an extraordinary mentor and confidant,” he said.
China’s youth unemployment fuels rise in postgraduate studies
Youth unemployment in China climbed to nearly 19% in August, its highest level so far this year, according to official data. Analysts say that the higher level of youth unemployment is driving more college graduates to enroll in graduate schools to escape the job search as the world’s second-largest economy struggles.
According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, or NBS, late last week, the unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds rose from 17.1% in July to 18.8% in August. One big reason for the uptick in joblessness, the NBS said, is that nearly 12 million students graduated from Chinese universities this June, heightening competition in an already tough job market.
Postgraduates overtake graduates
“The job market has shrunk, and at the same time there are still so many graduates. Too many people are idling every day,” said Lin Chan-Hui, an assistant professor of the General Education Center at Feng Chia University in Taiwan. “Another way out is to return to school to study further and temporarily escape the competitive workplace.”
Some Chinese universities say they are seeing more postgraduate students than undergraduates.
According to the state-backed digital publication The Paper, the number of graduate students at Lanzhou University exceeded the total number of undergraduate students for the first time. Lanzhou University is located in the capital of northwestern China’s Gansu Province.
In eastern China’s coastal Zhejiang Province, the Zhejiang University of Technology shows 5,382 new graduate students were admitted this year, beating out the number of new undergraduate students by 40.
The trend was already picking up at more famous Chinese universities last year.
Last December, Beijing’s Tsinghua University said the number of undergraduate freshmen in the previous academic year was 3,760, while the number of master's and doctoral students was 12,069.
Shanghai’s Fudan University in October 2023 reported 15,000 undergraduate students and nearly 37,000 graduate students.
China's Ministry of Education said that last year there were more than 47 million people enrolled in higher education institutes, 1.3 million were graduate students, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Lei, a higher education consultant in Shenzhen, who due to the sensitivity of the subject only gave his surname, told VOA the trend of higher education is moving toward "college graduates who don’t go to graduate school would immediately become unemployed" amid China's economic slowdown.
"On one hand, studying in graduate school can really help you find a job. On the other hand, it’s also an avoidance mentality,” Lei said.
Wandering masters and doctors
Feng Chia University’s Lin said that having an undergraduate degree is not enough in fields like technological innovation and scientific research, so it is still necessary to get a postgraduate degree in certain fields.
On the other hand, he said, China has too many people getting doctorates and master’s degrees and not enough technical and vocational education so there will be "fierce competition for upper-level work, but no one does the lower-level work." Highly educated young people are not willing to engage in grassroots work, Lin said, so there will be more and more "wandering masters and doctors."
Lin said the geopolitical tension between China and the U.S. has also made studying abroad for a postgraduate degree harder, so more students choose a domestic one instead.
Chinese netizens seem to agree that waiting for the job market to improve is their best hope.
A Hunan netizen on China’s Weibo social media platform under the name "Da Ke Ya Tang" said: "The market will not be able to provide so many jobs in the foreseeable future, so we have to leave the problem to the future."
"If colleges and universities cannot adapt to the country's demand for innovative and pioneering talents and reform the way students are trained, more employment pressure may accumulate in society in a few years," writer Wang Guojin said in a post on Weibo.
COVID students coping?
A PhD student in Shanghai who, due to the sensitivity of the subject, only gave his surname Zeng, told VOA the increase in master's and doctoral students is also because many graduate students went to college during the COVID-19 pandemic and are struggling to adapt. Zeng blames remote learning for their struggles with social interaction and the skills needed to compete in the job market.
"This group of college students obviously lacks some socialization skills, at least in recruitment interviews,” Zeng said. “They can't reach the same level as the previous students.”
Zeng adds that monthly stipends for master's and doctoral students ranges from roughly $143 to $700 and Chinese universities encourage entrepreneurship by providing funds to start small projects through competitions.
“Who wouldn’t want to continue their studies and earn money at the same time?” she asked.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
Many US college students eligible for federal food money
Many college students in the United States are eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, previously known as food stamps, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But often, students don’t take advantage of the program because of complicated rules or a lack of awareness. U.S. News and World Report explains who can enroll and how to get benefits. (September 2024)
Islamic group files lawsuit against University of Georgia
The chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the U.S. state of Georgia filed a lawsuit against the University of Georgia alleging anti-Muslim discrimination.
The lawsuit says students associated with a group advocating for Palestinian justice have been the target of harassment on campus, and the university took no meaningful action to end the harassment, Atlanta News First reported. (September 2024)
