Job Discussion Forums

[iftach]

My employer wants me to do a TESOL Certificate, provided by Qinghua University through his school's training. I am wondering if it well help me in anyway to have this degree outside of China (considering I already have a job here...)? Does a TESOL certificate from a Chinese University hold any weight outside of China?

[Shan-Shan]

China's ESL industry is near third-world; Chinese university degrees are worthless outside China and Africa. Not a difficult question to answer.

[Anda]

All any place wants is a 110 hour English certificate but in the West they want a good pass rate and at least in Sydney you have to be good at grammer even though it only counts for 10% of the mark but they use it to judge the rest of your work. As can be seen the university is up front.

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[iftach]

Mmmm... thanks for information.
If i go back to Sydney, I don't think I'll be doing this job though.... What about in Japan or Korea? Is a Chinese certificate worth anything there?

[bearcanada]

Chinese university degrees are absolutely NOT worthless outside of China and Africa, and to suggest that is not only uninformed and wrong, but quite stupid.

North America for sure will recognise engineers, medical doctors and many others who were trained in China. For doctors immigrating from China, there are a few exams to rewrite but that is true for immigrants from England or Europe too, not just from China.

What is the purpose of all this uninformed trashing of China? If some of us hate this place so much and have such a low opinion of it, we should go home.

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[lostinasia]

[Shan-Shan]

Bearcanada -- I had several Chinese classmates at university "redoing" their bachelor degrees as they were deemed quite useless by companies in Canada. I've also heard from hundreds of students here in China about how they long to go abroad to "enhance" their education to international standards.

A Chinese university degree carries little weight abroad.

Keep your stupidity to yourself; no need to smear it on this board.

[mjlpsu]

The biggest question the OP needs to ask is: Who's paying for the certificate? If your boss is paying (or even paying most of it), I say take it. Don't know if it'll help much outside of China, but it can't hurt.

[bearcanada]

Shan Shan, I can't account for your friends having to redo their Bachelor's degrees, but I have 7 or 8 Chinese friends in Canada who are petroleum engineers, and they were happily accepted by Canadian oil companies, and I know of two in the US who had the same experience.

And for medical doctors, I have a Chinese student in Shanghai with an M.D. and an M.A., and all she needs to be accepted for medical practice in the US is level 7 in IELTS. She will have to write an overall medical exam, but that is true for people from all other countries, not just China. The situation is exactly the same for Canada - we have medical doctors from India, China, Eastern Europe - all they need to do is write that same overall exam and they have their license.

Some degrees from China may not be comparable because the course material is different (accounting, maybe teaching, psychology; I don't know) , but to say that all Chinese degrees are worthless abroad is patent nonsense. I have personal, first-hand experience with these people.

It's possible that those to whom you refer have degrees from lower-level universities, or low marks, or one of many other reasons. I doubt you have any direct knowledge or experience to make the very incorrect and insulting claims you did.

Until you know more than you do, perhaps it is you who should keep his stupidity to himself. If your friends want to emigrate, I suggest they check with the consulate of that country, and not with you.

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[kungfucowboy83]

bearcanada It sounds to me like your friends have post-graduate degrees in hard sciences engineering or medicine wich will be of value in most countries as the chinese teach that fairly seroiusly and well. It also sounds like they passed some equivilence test of some type.

where as shan-shan's friends had Bachelors degrees and probably failed the tests. I don't see either stories as contradictory.

[Shan-Shan]

There are some first class institutions in China; the papers issued by the remaining 500 or so will do very little in securing one a decent career abroad (or even in China in some cases).

As for my "insulting" claims -- what's your beef, bear? I hear the term "垃圾大学" from professors and students alike when discussing the state of higher education in China. Should I start calling them stupid because bearcanada from canada says so?

Talk to people in education in China. Yes, there are some fine centers of learning in China; however, the majority of degrees printed in China are not exchangeable abroad. My views have been formed from speaking with people in the system, and not out of my ass as you probably figure.

As for people wanting to emigrate -- yeah, I wish they'd direct their questions to the proper authorities.

[bearcanada]

Perhaps both of the above posters are correct in their latest comments. I believe it is usually the 'softer' areas that have more difficulty, unless one can produce voluminous documentation of the course content to demonstrate to a foreign institution that the studies were indeed equivalent.

However, there are differences in the acceptance of educational background between other educational institutions and employers. Being from Canada, a US employer might happily accept my degree whereas Harvard may not. I know this does occur between Canada and the US, much less with China.

I won't make any more posts here on this because I'm already responsible for hijacking this thread - for which I apologise.

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