Job Discussion Forums

[waxwing]

[william wallace]

On the subway(Beijing) it's advertising it's IELTS classes, and amongst the hip young Chinese(teachers?)is this middle-aged Aussie I used to examine with C Green....?

[upchuckles]

I was ready to write something until I saw shan-shans post.. um.. PM the location.. i cant imagine anything better than camping in the middle of that field and roasting marshmellows over a campfire made of "holy-smokey" *giggle*

What were we talking about again? Oh, New Oriental, from my understanding , NO has a readlly good rep amoung the Chinese people. Almost everyone knows about them and has something positive to say.

Huh.. Nice pic shan-shan.. you made my day.

[englishgibson]

[Vanica]

Interesting Financial Times article on New Oriental.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3678b262-7674-11dc-ad83-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

[Vanica]

If you're in the US, go to www.ft.com then select Business Life, then Entrepreneurship, then China hones its English skills, 9 Oct.

[englishgibson]

can't get on either here in china...would you mind posting some quotes out of there?

cheers and beers to no oriental

[Vanica]

I can't see it anymore either, should have copied it when I had the chance.

From what I recall, the owner talks about starting the school because he himself wanted to study in the US. He says the focus is now widening from college entrance exams, and that the growth now is coming from people who want to increase their salaries by learning English.

He also relates how much wining and dining were involved and continue to be involved in running the school, and how fierce is the competition from other schools (one employee was stabbed by a competitor).

[Vanica]

Found it another way:


China hones its English accent
By Raphael Minder

Published: October 9 2007 17:29 | Last updated: October 9 2007 17:29
Yu Minhong attributes his decision to abandon a teaching career and go into business partly to his wife�s intense nagging.

�Some of my friends were making more money and my wife wanted me to be more successful. She felt that, compared with them, I was a loser,� he says with characteristic candour.

Mr Yu rose to the challenge, founding New Oriental and turning it into China�s biggest private education company, with English-language schools and other learning centres in 34 cities.

In the latest financial year, more than 1m students enrolled, boosting New Oriental�s revenues by 36 per cent to more than Rmb1bn ($136m).

The overwhelming majority of students come to New Oriental to learn English, often to prepare for an entrance exam to a US university. Increasingly, however, the incentive is simply to land a better job in China.

Mr Yu says: �If you look at a city such as Beijing, there�s an international event every day, so English speakers are clearly in great demand. And the Chinese people also know that, with English proficiency, they can probably double their salary immediately.�

The lure of a lucrative career has driven a rapid rise in education spending, which now accounts for about 15 per cent of China�s overall consumer spending, second only to food, according to JPMorgan.

Besides pressure from his wife, Mr Yu says he was motivated to start New Oriental after failing to secure a scholarship to an American university.

The 45-year-old entrepreneur says: �I got admitted by various American universities but none of them would give me a scholarship and I just didn�t have enough money. If somebody had offered me a scholarship, I would have studied anything, even religion.�

So, Mr Yu tried to raise enough funds to send himself to the US by moonlighting as a private language tutor while also teaching English at Peking University. Eventually he stopped the double shifts after realising it would take five more years to raise enough money to study in America: �That�s when I decided that I probably should try to do some business here instead.��

After some arduous lobbying to obtain a licence to set up a private school (see below), he opened the classroom doors to 13 students at the first New Oriental School in Beijing in November 1993.

It was a move that enabled Mr Yu to travel finally to the US. But his destination last year was the New York Stock Exchange, not a university. Since that NYSE initial public offering, the market value of New Oriental has climbed to more than $2bn.

Following a secondary share sale, Mr Yu now has a stake of 25 per cent, as well as maintaining voting control through the holdings of other company employees and associates.

With a war chest of about $200m, Mr Yu is determined to open more schools across China and diversify beyond language training, with maths soon to be added to the curriculum. He wants to increase New Oriental�s market share, which is estimated at 5 per cent of the country�s fragmented $3bn language-teaching industry.

The educated and increasingly urban society from which New Oriental draws its clients is far away from Mr Yu�s upbringing on a farm. He recalls: �My parents were out all day in the field. They were illiterate and didn�t even think about learning Chinese, let alone English.�� But his mother encouraged him to attend school and at the age of 16 he started to teach himself English.

His education not only gave him the foundations for his business but to also become a prolific author. Some of his 10 books have made the Chinese best-seller lists, including The Relentless Pursuit of Success, a motivational tome that has been translated into English.

Not content with being a management guru, he hopes to become a �spiritual leader�� for a new and more ambitious generation of Chinese. �I want to tell students how to fight for a better future,� he says.

As foreign private equity firms seek to invest more in China and the country develops its own venture capital industry, the development of China�s education sector is attracting a growing number of deep-pocketed investors. Mr Yu recognises that New Oriental needs to adapt its educational offering to stay ahead of the competition.

He is considering venturing into offering subjects such as chemistry, as well as providing more online teaching in response to a society hungry for education: 16 per cent of Chinese students were in higher education in 2005, a rise from 2 per cent in 1990, according to official Chinese statistics.

There is also greater emphasis on what Mr Yu calls �VIP teaching�, a response to a new generation of Chinese students who can afford more customised courses.

�There are so many VCs coming into education in China and investing into smaller language schools, mostly from the US. This is one of the real challenges,� he says.

That American challenge is taken seriously by a man who prefers to be called Michael outside China and has maintained his admiration for the US in spite of his scholarship failures.

Mr Yu cites Martin Luther King as a hero and says a speech by the American civil rights leader inspired New Oriental�s motto: �Hew a stone of hope out of the mountain of despair and you can make your life a splendid one!�

As to Mr Yu�s own dream, he believes �China will be a place where two great cultures can merge, the Chinese culture and the American culture�.

That might be a scary thought for outsiders already worried about China�s rise as an economic powerhouse, but chimes with the optimism that Mr Yu exudes on almost any topic relating to China�s development, as well as the progress of his company.

So has his success regained him his wife�s respect? Not yet. Mr Yu jokes �this time she wants me to stay more at home and now thinks I�m a loser for not managing to squeeze in the time. I�m clearly not good at managing my wife.�

Wheels of Chinese bureaucracy require extensive lubrication

A strong constitution is required to launch a company in China. To obtain his first school licence, Yu Minhong had to spend several months drinking through the night with bureaucrats. On one occasion, his consumption was so heavy he found himself recovering in hospital.

�In China, you have to drink a lot of alcohol,� says Mr Yu. �Today, it�s easier because
most officials are graduates and more educated. But 15 years
ago, every guy just got drunk.�

Sometimes, the contact-building went even further, especially in the early days of New Oriental when rivals did not hesitate to use violence to stall his ambitions. On one occasion, one of his employees was stabbed by somebody allegedly �working for another much bigger school�.

Mr Yu then spent two days at a police bureau trying to work out �which [policeman] was kinder�� � before taking him out for the inevitable meal so that he would help solve the company�s security issues.

In fact, at the start of his business career, most of his savings went on entertaining bureaucrats. He is still doing plenty of wining and dining but now the tables have turned.

�Almost every day, I still have to eat with some official to build a closer relationship. But now, they mostly treat me because they want advice on how to educate their kids.�

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

[SnoopBot]

NO delivers what they promise and this is a reason they have a good reputation. Their Chinese teachers are very good and are highly paid. It is not uncommon for a Chinese teacher at the NO in Beijing to haul in 16,000 RMB + a month. They are paid a fixed salary and an additional salary per student.

Classes are usually very large with high tech aids used to teach large groups. (each student being taught is an additional raise per hour so 100 students can raise the basic hourly wage by more than 200 RMB an hour)

They deliver the best results in the English testing arena, and as others mentioned they were caught by ETS years ago with test fraud and had their testing center license revoked for a time.

It is rumored that they still have "Professional Test takers" that sit in the adaptive testing centers to compile test questions that come off the latest test, these questions are taught in the exam prep courses boosting pass rates.

I am certain that they pay higher wages to their FT staff than most of the other mills do, but this is one place where the Chinese teachers get paid higher than FT's for the testing prep courses and specialized courses.

Much of the teaching is done in a bilingual sense, using both English and Chinese in the classroom. This is one school that would pay a higher wage to a FT that could speak both English and Chinese.

The NO bookstore is one of the best places to find teaching material, I've gone there many times for materials.

My wife took courses at NO to boost her English level before she became an English Teacher, she still keeps contact with friends that teach there. If you have specific questions I'll ask her.

I know about the Chinese part of the school, but I do not know any of the FT's that work there. Years ago I had a Demo lesson for a part time position but couldn't make it.

If I remember correctly most of their FT positions were part-time ones.

[just another laowai]

Been there, done that. It's a joke.
If you are smart, you will get on as a recorder, pull in 700 per hour, work about 5 hours a week and never have to see a single student.

[SnoopBot]

[johnchina]

NO is very strong on teaching reading and listening. This (plus the cheating mentioned by snoopbot) is why they were very successful with the old TOEFL.

They're much weaker on teaching speaking and writing (hence eaker results with IELTS). This is partly due to their policy of having the 'teacher' ('lecturer' would be more accurate) simply 'teaching' spoken and written English by talking to the class. A friend of mine was actually fired by NO for "making students talk" during oral English classes. When I worked there (for a very short time), I was told that students could only speak English if they were repeating my words parrot-fashion.

snoopbot - 160 an hour is what I was offered and is one of the two reasons I didn't work there for long. (For the second reason, see the paragraph above.)

I'd give them the following ratings:
Marketing 10/10 - no company in China comes close to NO, IMHO.
Test-taking results 6/10 - not too bad, but weak in speaking and writing.
Teaching students to actually use English communicatively - 1/10 - awful!

[just another laowai]

[englishgibson]

Vanica thanx for the story

I have a student who've studied at NO in Beijing. Since someone here mentioned that NO's got bilingual environment, i'd like to point out that my student cannot contribute to discussions on varieties of topics in English well enough. His naive and primitive replies with an extreemly unusual (chinese) intonation gives me a good idea where it comes from. By the way, this student's planning to join a western uni next year.

peace to NO
and
cheers and beers to chinese business environment