The fast road to China | To prop up sagging local enrollment, Lee Academy expands in China
Photo/ Courtesy Lee Academy
U.S. Abroad: Lee Headmaster Bruce Lindberg says the school's newest campus in Wuhan, China, will offer students an "American education".
The nonprofit Lee Academy, which over the last decade has watched its annual day-student enrollment drop by almost 30%, recently found itself at risk of closing after more than a century of teaching high schoolers. The reason was the waning student population in Penobscot County. That was until it discovered a global solution to its local problem.
On Sept. 2, the first students in Lee Academy’s Wuhan, China, school began classes in what Lee claims is the first American high school on the Chinese mainland. About 80 Chinese day students and boarding students are receiving what Lee Headmaster Bruce Linderg calls an “American education” using the same curriculum taught at Lee Academy’s Maine school. The teachers are all American, the classes are taught in English and Wuhan students can opt to spend any semester they choose on Lee’s Maine campus.
Lee Academy-Wuhan is located in a Chinese public school in a city of roughly nine million, and students going for a Lee diploma pay the equivalent of $20,000 a year to take courses like biology and U.S. history in addition to conventional Chinese courses from Chinese teachers. For a commission Lindberg says is roughly 20% of tuition, or around $4,000 per student annually, Lee handles academic recordkeeping, awards diplomas, and supervises instructors in Wuhan. The Foreign Language School of Pasadena, Calif., hires the American teaching staff — though Lee can send some of its own whenever it likes — and the student exchange agency IntoEdVentures in Babylon, N.Y., is in charge of recruiting students to attend the Asian schools. In its first year alone, Lee stands to make around $300,000 on the venture and, long-term, revenue from the satellite schools will be used to improve the campus of Lee’s Maine school and increase its endowment, which currently totals $1.4 million.
Within five years, Lindberg expects Lee Academy-Wuhan will have a total enrollment of between 300 and 400 students, though Lindberg says Chinese government officials predict a more rapid growth to 800 to 1,000 students.
“The business meetings have moved very quickly and very smoothly, just because of the priorities of the Chinese people,” says Lindberg. “They want an American education.”
Lee was approached to participate in the satellite school by IntoEdVentures, which had for years recruited Asian students to board at Lee. And though the satellite idea only gelled in March, the coalition already is planning to open schools in Beijing and the city of Guangzhou, China, in 2009, and is looking at five other sites in China and five in South Korea. All of the sites abroad are urban areas, with populations in the multimillions, a far cry from Lee, population about 850.
Lee Academy, which generates $3 million in annual revenue from its American school, is jumping at the opportunity to make its stateside education more diverse.
“It really promotes local education,” says Lindberg of the student-exchange element of the venture. “Our students from rural central Maine are in an extremely diverse population that probably can’t be replicated anywhere else in the state of Maine, besides maybe Portland.”
As part of the arrangement, Lee has hired an assistant headmaster who lives in Wuhan, and Lindberg is required to visit the site several times a year to make sure the education is up to par. The whole experience, Lindberg says, has been a “whirlwind.”
“It’s moving much faster than we thought possible,” he says. “It’s been extremely rewarding — I’ve been to China twice in the last four months.”
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments