Dive Brief:

• Oxford High School, north of Detroit, started building a pipeline between Michigan and China in 2010 under then-Superintendent William Skilling, and hundreds of Chinese parents sent their children for two years of study and a diploma that would make it easier for them to get into U.S. colleges.
• In a lengthy look at Oxford’s effort and similar initiatives around the country, The New York Times reports Chinese families paid as much as $40,000 to middlemen to be placed in U.S. high schools and at Oxford, $10,000 of that went to tuition, which offered a boon to the school’s budget when multiplied by 200 students.
• While more than 2,300 students in the Oxford district take Mandarin classes, widespread local opposition to the influx of foreign students — and a multimillion-dollar student center and dorm that would cost the school nothing — helped force Skilling to retire in 2015 and limit the number of Chinese students coming each year, as well as the length of their stay.

Dive Insight:

While public schools are not allowed to charge tuition from students living within district boundaries, they can charge tuition for students coming from afar. Public colleges in the United States have increasingly gone after international students to charge the significantly higher out-of-state tuition. The practice seems to have trickled down to the high school level.

While there is demand for the practice in China and demand for tuition dollars in the U.S., a common complaint of such programs is the extra support Chinese students need, linguistically. When too many limited English speakers get into one classroom, teachers run their classrooms differently. Beyond cultural tensions, local parents question the negative impact on academics.