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☆ Private Schools Rethink China Future After Flunking Growth Test
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-07 | by ( Nov. | At P.M. | ) www.usnews.com time to read: +6 min

Dozens of international and private schools in China are closing or merging, industry executives said, weighed down by tighter regulation, a slowing economy and dwindling foreign student numbers. Dulwich College operates nine schools in China including bilingual schools catering to Chinese nationals that have been hit hardest by regulatory changes. Strategic plans for growth of its high schools in China were "scaled back in light of changing government regulations", Dulwich said in its 2022 annual report. Authorities have also moved to control the number of private schools. Dozens of schools, from kindergartens to high schools, have shut or stalled in the past two years.

Persons: Farah Master, Kane Wu, Julian Fisher, Fisher, Dulwich, Xi, It's, Frank Feng, Jimmy Chin, Nicholas Burns, Mathias Boyer, Casey, Roxanne Liu, Dorothy Kam, Muralikumar Anantharaman Organizations: Reuters, Dulwich College, Venture Education, Strategic, Education, Motion, Dulwich, British, Authorities, Dulwich's, Victoria Kid House, Western International School of, Everpine, Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Science, Technology of, International School of Beijing, Casey Hall Locations: Kane Wu HONG KONG, British, China, Asia, China's, Beijing, Dulwich, Singapore, South Korea, U.S, Britain, Canada, Shanghai, Lucton, Greater Bay Area, Shenzhen, Eton, Guangzhou, Western International School of Shanghai, Xi'an, Technology of China, Anhui, Hong Kong

Dozens of international and private schools in China are closing or merging, industry executives said, weighed down by tighter regulation, a slowing economy and dwindling foreign student numbers. A rapid expansion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic drove a surge of privately run bilingual schools in China offering a western exam curriculum. Dulwich College operates nine schools in China including bilingual schools catering to Chinese nationals that have been hit hardest by regulatory changes. It mandated that Chinese compulsory education be taught in private schools, aligning the curriculum more closely to public schools and making parents question the need to pay private school fees when their children can attend free government schools. Authorities have also moved to control the number of private schools.

Persons: Aly, Julian Fisher, Fisher, Dulwich, Xi, It's, Frank Feng, Jimmy Chin, Nicholas Burns, Mathias Boyer, Casey, Roxanne Liu, Dorothy Kam, Muralikumar Organizations: REUTERS, Dulwich College, Venture Education, Strategic, Education, Motion, Dulwich, British, Authorities, Dulwich's, Victoria Kid House, Western International School of, Everpine, Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Science, Technology of, International School of Beijing, Casey Hall, Thomson Locations: Shanghai, China, HONG KONG, British, Asia, China's, Beijing, Dulwich, Singapore, South Korea, U.S, Britain, Canada, Lucton, Greater Bay Area, Shenzhen, Eton, Guangzhou, Western International School of Shanghai, Xi'an, Technology of China, Anhui, Hong Kong

☆ Xi'an Jiaotong University: Top Chinese university scraps English tests in move cheered by nationalists
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-21 | by ( Nectar Gan | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

In a notice Wednesday, the Xi’an Jiaotong University in the capital city of Shaanxi province said students will no longer need to pass a nationwide standardized English test – nor any other English exams – to be able to graduate with bachelor’s degrees. But in recent years, some universities have downgraded the importance of English, either by replacing the national College English Test with their own exams or – as in the case of the Xi’an Jiaotong University – dropping English qualifications altogether as a graduation criteria. For some liberal-leaning Chinese, the downgrade of English is symbolic of China’s inward turn and a tightening of ideological control. “We need English to understand the world. These days, if you don’t understand English, you’ll still fall behind in the scientific and technological world,” a Weibo user said.

Persons: Xi Jinping, ”, Mao, Xi, it’s, Weibo, don’t, you’ll Organizations: Hong Kong CNN, Jiaotong University, English, College English, Jiaotong, Weibo, World Trade Organization Locations: China, Hong Kong, Shaanxi, Weibo, Shanghai, Taiwan

☆ ChatGPT and GPT-4 skew the most liberal — and Meta's LLaMA is the most conservative AI model, a new study says
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-11 | by ( Kylie Kirschner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

In a new study, researchers gave 14 AI models a political compass test and graphed the data. OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 were the most liberal, Meta's LLaMA was the most conservative, and Google's BERT models were in between. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's LaMDA AI model, and other chatbots have been criticized for sometimes giving racist, sexist, and otherwise biased responses. A political compass graph from the study shows how each AI model is biased. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman has said in response to criticisms of ChatGPT's left-leaning political bias, "we made a mistake."

Persons: BERT, OpenAI's, Shangbin Feng, Chan, Yuhan Liu, Yulia Tsvetkov, RoBERTa, Meta, Steven Piantadosi, Sam Altman, ChatGPT, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Greg Brockman, ChatGPT's, Brockman, Elon Musk, OpenAI, OpenAI —, Musk Organizations: Morning, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, OpenAI, Google, UC Locations: Xi'an, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Sudan

☆ China's youth unemployment hits a record high, deepening its economic scars
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( Clement Tan | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

In this article GSBDGS Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNTChina's young face the prospect of dimmer economic gains amid record youth unemployment in the world's second-largest economy. "The expansion of college education in the late 1990s created this huge influx of college graduates, but there is a misalignment between demand and supply of high skilled workers. "Increasingly, college graduates are taking up positions that are not commensurate with their training and credentials to avoid unemployment," Lu told CNBC. China's young face the prospect of dimmer economic gains amid record youth unemployment in the world's second-largest economy. "But the plan was for China's economy to transform from labor-intensive industry to more technological, with a strong service-oriented, knowledge economy," Yeung added.

[1/7] Farmer Wang Zhanling sits next to his wife in their house in Quansheng village, Heilongjiang Province, China, February 8, 2023. The state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences sees the pension system running out of money by 2035. "If the pension system does not change, this is unsustainable," said Xiujian Peng, senior research fellow in the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University in Australia. The province has the lowest birth rate in China, with just over 100,000 births in 2021 and 460,000 deaths. Many experts, including Macquarie's chief China economist Larry Hu, suggest implementing a unified national pension system, backstopped by the more resourceful central government rather than cash-strapped local administrations.

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