Seeking admission to top colleges, Chinese students flock to U.S. private schools
By Daniel A. Gross
When the lunch bell rings at Cape Cod Academy, students line up for a weekly treat — food from Great House, a local Chinese restaurant.
At first glance, the piles of fried rice and barbecue pork might seem ideal for the private high school’s international students. Nearly 20 percent of the student body is Chinese, and in the hallways, throngs of students can often be found chatting in Mandarin.
But the Chinese students don’t find the lunch offerings especially appetizing.
“They put too much oil in it,” says Zhang, 18, a third-year student who, here, in a village of 3,500 people on the southern Cape coast, goes by Tony. “To be honest, that shop will probably shut off if it was in China.”
The international flavor of Cape Cod Academy, contrasts sharply with local demographics. The school is in one of the state’s least-diverse counties — a summer oceanfront getaway in the town of ……, about 70 miles southeast of Boston — with a population that is 93 percent white and less than 2 percent Asian, according to census data.
……
“A lot of Chinese families are realizing that they have to get into the process earlier,” said Christine Ye, a researcher at the University of San Francisco who studies the experience of East Asian immigrants in U.S. schools. That drives them to seek a U.S. high school education to gain an edge for college admissions. “It’s getting so competitive.”
The move is creating growing pockets of Chinese children in U.S. schools, sometimes in places not known for international diversity — such as ……. For the U.S. schools, the change can mean a financial windfall from full-paying Chinese families and an opportunity to broaden their student body’s horizons.
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