Job Discussion Forums

[profM]

This private school has a main campus in Beijing and a satellite campus on the Beijing suburban periphery. The satellite school has about a thousand students, most of whom are studying for a B.A. degree. The students are mostly nice-looking young women that have not achieved sufficiently high college entrance scores to get into a good state school. The school recruits them by offering a curriculum focusing on general subjects and a major aimed at qualifying the students to be airline stewards and stewardesses.

The chances of obtaining the high paying airline jobs are very slim and only one student has recently gotten an invitation to work for an airline in the two years the satellite operation has been functioning. In addition, the school is said to demand a high fee, up to 30,000 RMB, for the administration to really go to bat for its students when they apply for an airline job.

The real problem that I wish to report is that the teachers at this school have not received their salaries for the months of Sept., Oct., Nov. or Dec., 2006 as of this date. They have been complaining to everyone they can and the students are very unhappy.

A friend of mine has been asked but has refused to help the school to recruit a foreign teacher to teach English there. I suggest that Dave's readers avoid this school, which has this website www.mauedu.com, because of its unscrupulous practices.

[profM]

Here's what gets me about this school. It has helped open my eyes a bit more about China and I don't mean about the American type capitalist aspects, you know, like the part about high school grads being hyped about career opportunities in a very tight semi-glamor market. China's gone capitalist and that's the kind of buyer beware capitalism we're all familiar with in the West, even with the bit of extra Chinese bribery that may be involved when a school like MAU (can you beat the name!?) is going to help a girl get selected by some Chinese or foreign airline (if the foreign airline is Asian, or maybe Arab, or maybe Latin American -- my biases or my experience -- ask me, don't make pejorative assumptions, please). Anyway, that's not what gives me the creeps about the school.

What I find seriously distressing is that they've gotten away without paying their teachers for five months and I know the owners have money, things and property to easily cover the just couple of hundred grand involved -- even less than that. It's their doing that to a bunch of nice, young, clean Chinese teachers -- with impunity -- that gets me. It's how China, the party, the atmosphere, the system, the ruling class can get away with it. I just can't believe it. It's incredible. There is just like no standard mechanism to deal with people like the owners of this private university.

[China.Pete]

"What I find seriously distressing is that they've gotten away without paying their teachers for five months, and I know the owners have money." - ProfM

You need to file a complaint with the Beijing Foreign Experts Bureau. They were very helpful about getting one school I worked at to pay us on time. What you have described is rather more serious than that was.

"China's gone capitalist, and that's the kind of buyer beware capitalism we're all familiar with in the West" - ProfM

Isn't that the truth.