How about those joint-venture universities?

I'm starting to think about applying for jobs for next school year. I'll finish my Master's in English Language Teaching this summer, and will be ready and able to start work for the 2010 school year. I'm interested in teaching university students, with an eye to continue working with adults in the future.

I'm in my late 20's and want to earn enough to be able to start saving for "grown up" things while also writing and doing research so to bolster the CV for either doctoral studies or further teaching jobs. I'd like to come back to China to teach and continue learning the language, but I think the only way doing so would make sense (both financially and professionally) would be working at a joint-venture school.

I've been researching them, and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Nottingham's in Ningbo have come up in searches. There's also Missouri's campus in Dalian. Any others that I might check out? Any thoughts from any of you that have worked at joint venture schools?

The joint ventures have their pros and cons, just like any job.  A significant pro is that they pay more than most regular uni jobs and even than most training centre jobs.  You are also generally taken relatively seriously as a teacher (not so much of the dancing monkey stuff). 

Con side? More work - especially marking.  Some teachers are also disappointed by the fact that at the end of the day, these joint ventures are out to make money, with all that that entails.

I know personally people working at UNNC, Liverpool Suzhou and at a similar set up in Shanghai run by Kaplan and a consortium of British Unis - 'Sino-British College'.  Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions.

I work at Missouri State - Liaoning Normal University in Dalian.  I really like it here.  They have much more integrity than many of the joint venture universities.

All students must pass the College Entrance exam - so they are all in-plan students.  They also need a grade of 110 or higher on the English portion of the exam.  This means many of them are capable of understanding English language lectures.  (Not all unfortunately)

Yep...Dragonsaver's Missouri State school in Dalian appears to be a real gem.

They aren't all that way.

The bad thing about these schools is that in most cases, the Western partner has little or no say in the actual day-to-day operation of the schools. They're totally unregulated by the Western organizations that set the standards back home, so even schools that are quite respectable in their home countries become total sluts in China. They just sit back and smile and watch the funds roll in, leaving the Chinese side free to be as sleazy as they wanna be.

And they wanna be pretty damn sleazy. At the ones I worked for, pretty much any student whose family could afford the tuition was admitted...even if they were hopelessly unprepared for instruction given in English. Grade books were secretly cooked so that pretty much everyone passed and graduated on time, no matter how oafish and inert they may have been in class. Outright bribes for grades and degrees were pretty common knowledge. At one there was some suggestion that bribe money was crossing the water to secure admissions and visas in the Western country.

Nothing washes away the thin veneer of pretense of being respected as a teacher quite as quickly and effectively as your students knowing that nothing you can do will seriously impact them in any way.

At one school I was teaching core-credit Business classes- Marketing and Management. I think the English language side was less pressured and therefore less totally corrupted...but still not free of monkey business.

If you really care about teaching, and take any shred of pride in what you do in a classroom, be especially picky about working in this sector.

I found it totally demoralizing.

I work at Missouri State - Liaoning Normal University in Dalian.  I really like it here.  They have much more integrity than many of the joint venture universities.

All students must pass the College Entrance exam - so they are all in-plan students.  They also need a grade of 110 or higher on the English portion of the exam.  This means many of them are capable of understanding English language lectures.  (Not all unfortunately)

I'm also at LNU-MSU.  It's not perfect but seems like a gem compared to many of the stories I've heard.  I like it most of the time.

Thanks for the helpful replies! I was actually born in Missouri, so I've felt partial to them all along
I read bad things about  XJLU on another (and much lesser) ESL forum, but took them with the necessary truckload of salt, given the source.

I'm planning to send out emails with a resume and cover letter in the next week to see if any of the schools are interested in me coming out to visit/interview. Since I'm in Beijing, I should very much like to see the schools in person. Dalian and Shanghai/Suzhou aren't that far from Beijing.

Points well taken from Raoul and MK about the difficulties of for-profit education, especially when it may come to grades, etc. Thanks for the heads up about that, if I am hired on at one of these schools I'll try not to let things that are largely out of my hands bother me.

dragonsaver and radiojedi, does MSU have online access to journal databases (jstor, EBSCO, etc)?

To add what value I can to the thread, here are links to the different joint-venture institutions I've found:

• Missouri State University China Campus
• The Sino-British College (cheers, MK, hadn't heard of this one)
• The University of Nottingham Ningbo China
• Xi'an Jiaoton-Liverpool University

Ha, I've never even been to Missouri.  This confuses my students sometimes since I'm from Minnesota and it sounds similar to them...

I know MSU will start listing new jobs on a few job sites soon, so keep an eye open.  At MSU you have access to library.missouristate.edu which has fairly standard access to various journal databases.

I read bad things...on another (and much lesser) ESL forum, but took them with the necessary truckload of salt, given the source.

Indeed. I lurk on ESL Cafe and much of the stuff there is completely, and sometimes I think deliberately, misleading.

Once there one poster asked about an offer they had for SBC, and the replies given were along the lines of 'it must be a scam because no school in China offers salaries that high'.

Uhhh...I knew people working at XJLU, and they weren't terribly happy there. Mostly academic honesty issues....

Don't know about MSU China, but I'm not sure I'd count on things like EBSCO, especially at JV schools. Access to media is tightly controlled at Chinese unis. Most JV schools are 2-year or at best 4-year programs, and are not exactly hotbeds of academic research. And, of course, they cost money, so most school administrators gonna be agin' it.

It does seem that many foreign institutions are far too eager to jump into bed with a Chinese partner, take the money and turn the other way - I've seen it.  But, let's not forget either that academic honesty, corruption and cheating can be a problem anywhere in the world.  There have been a number of 'scandals' recently at institutions solely within the UK involving pressure to pass sub-standard students or ignoring plagiarism, faked qualifications etc.  I think this reflects a crisis point in (UK) higher education as much as anything else - they need those international student fees.

A bit more info' on the positives though - My School runs UG, Master's and Ph.D. programmes. Assignments are submitted through Turnitin.  Conferences and symposiums are held here regularly.  Funding is also available to attend academic events elsewhere if you can make a case for it, and there is a professional development budget. I got 50% off my own MA (of course, I had to do it through the UK side of the JV!).   All teachers and students here get an Athens Eduserv account which grants access to a wide range of on-line journals and databases, and if something isn't on there you can make a request (which may or may not be granted) to have it added.

All in all, it's been a pretty nice place to work - I wouldn't have stayed otherwise.  It's easy to look at the negative side of things and find unpleasantness, and these problems are very real.  However, there are also forces at work in China to increase the quality and professionalism of education, and personally I think I've seen a lot of changes for the better even within the relatively short period that I have been here.

Does the Uni that you guys work for in Liaoning prov, Dalian, only hire north Americans? Is the salary better than average?

Assignments are submitted through Turnitin. 

I detest this program. I love the idea, but no university has the right to insist I submit my intellectual property to a datatbase which will retain a copy of this work for future plagiarism checking. It's my intellectual property, and if a company wants to put my work in a database and make profit from it they can pay me for the privelege.


I would hope the univerersities hired based on qualification/experience etc. rather than nationality. But, this is China, and I am inclined to think that anything is possible.

My University has Canadians, Americans, Chinese who received their Master's degrees in the USA, one from Singapore.  We have also had one from Malaysia, and a few from Australia as well.  I am not sure about all the teachers here as we have a lot of Foreign teachers.

The salary is very good.

You must have a Master's degree in the applicable academic subject in order to be able to teach that subject.

Welcome, Milkweed!

I agree with what MK adds here...no country is entirely free of these education-related plagues.

But I want to point out some differences, especially for those newer to this game.
In our countries, academic scandals can raise headlines. People can have their careers ended. Universities can face sanctions and punishments from the organizations that regulate them. Any students involved could lose their scholarships or be expelled.

But in way too damn many Chinese schools, things we'd consider "academic scandals"- manipulation and sale of grades or even entire degrees, admission of obviously unqualified students, low (if any at all) standards of performance, etc.- are an institution. They're the status quo. They're what people expect, and those committing them are considered intelligent and even admirable.

Thank God there are a few rays of hope, like those places where Dragonsaver and MK work. But there aren't too many like that.
Not nearly enough.

Sounds like there are a few places with serious integrity at uni's in China. (Maybe). I've read various forums extensively for 10 years now and have worked in Taiwan and more recently South Korea so I can moan and bitch with the best of them. Anyway, its good to collate the experiences of others alongside my own ones, as it helps build a more realistic picture of asia or ESL as a whole. I've written a down to earth critique of Korea, and of EPIK in particular, and the same issues seem to crop up for most of us regardless of country. That is, poor curriculim, serious communication difficulties (ie poor english language skills), poor textbooks, and blatant racism, xenophobia, duplicious behaviour, inability to problem solve etc etc. China's my next move and i'm expecting more of the same (from what ive gleened), except the local girls are a lot more friendlier. In Taiwan, i had a much better overall working and socialising experience than Korea. Korea's all about money for ESL teachers. IMO. China is about having some fun I hope.  I enjoy good analysis and opinions from you all. cheers.