Yenching Academy and the Schwarzman Scholars program comprise China’s attempt to set up a Rhodes/Marshall-style master’s degree. Both programs are fully-funded masters degrees comprised mostly of non-Chinese students. I was a Yenching Scholar in its third cohort from 2017-2019. What follows are some of my reflections on the experience and advice for applicants considering these programs.
Application process (from 2016…there have been two deans since I applied)
There was a big emphasis on the essay on ‘why China,’ so be sure to explain what role you expect China to have in your future professional life and why Yenching will help you achieve those goals.
Of late I hear more emphasis has gone on demonstrated interest in China through language study and past academic work. That said, there are generally a few people from each cohort who haven’t studied Mandarin (though this is easier to pull off if you’re from a region where Chinese instruction is less accessible like South Asia or Africa).
Academics
My classes at Yenching were significantly less demanding than advanced undergrad courses at top schools in the US, with many not going much deeper than what you’d learn in a lecture or seminar aimed at Freshmen. Yenching suffers from a ‘principal contradiction’ of on the one hand wanting to have students that have diverse academic interests and having to teach in English at a Chinese university. There are only so many courses they can offer to a program with just 120 students (most of whom don’t have Chinese strong enough to take graduate school courses in PKU’s other schools), so the courses for any discipline have to remain accessible to students who didn’t take courses in that discipline in undergrad. For example, a Yenching class in economics needs to not assume enough background to leave a philosophy or international relations major overwhelmed. This means that while you’re unlikely to learn new methodologies in disciplines you’re familiar with outside of self-study. However, it was certainly a lot of fun as someone with a history and economics background to get to take courses in Chinese literature and art history.
Your teachers will all be full-time PKU professors from other schools, 85% of them mainland Chinese and many with western PhD (there were a few white guys who teach at PKU’s business school that also taught Yenching courses). They vary in quality (some are quite good) but are limited in what they can teach by the central contradiction.
Non-native English speakers who haven’t written long papers in English or had to manage 50+ page English reading assignments may find the coursework slightly more challenging, but squeezing out passing grades should not be challenging for anyone Yenching admits.
Chinese language courses are still hidebound by many of the issues that plague Mandarin instruction more broadly, including dated material and an undue emphasis on reading. I eventually convinced my teachers to let me opt out of learning how to handwrite characters after finally convincing them that I didn’t care even if they gave me Ds. If you come to Yenching speaking no Chinese, and don’t do anything outside of the Yenching language requirements, you will maaaybe pass HSK3 after a year of instruction.
You are required to write a thesis but you have an entire year of funding to do so. Any PKU professor can be your thesis advisor, and the level of attention
In terms of academic freedom, I had no problem saying whatever I wanted on my class papers, but theses are another story as your advisor’s name will be forever attached to your paper so they’ll be somewhat responsible for your work. I had to make significant revisions to some pretty non-controversial stuff about tech regulations, and another classmate was forbidden entirely from writing a thesis relating to Islam in China.
Student Body and Campus Life
Far and away the best part of Yenching was the diversity and quality of human being in the student body. For starters, it’s maybe 30% American, not a high enough percentage for the Yankees to set the rules of the road. Nearly every student went to undergrad in their country of origin. While Americans likely encountered international students in undergrad, the type of Russian who went to an international school in Moscow before studying in the US is very different than a kid who went to a public high school and studied at St Petersburg University. Then you’ve got 20% Chinese and that final 50% encompassed 50+ countries in a 120-person student body.
In my year, every mainlander went to school in a Chinese university, meaning almost none of them went to international feeder high schools that lead their students to take the SAT and study abroad. While some foreigners complained that the Chinese students were too insular, my sense is that if you as a non-Chinese weren’t able to make friends with the Chinese students in Yenching, then it was your fault not theirs. The cohort of Chinese students who sign up to Yenching have fluent English and have opted into spending two years at a weird program without much of a domestic reputation whose entire draw is the exposure it provides to international classmates. If you can’t get chummy with these people, you probably weren’t ever going to make any Chinese friends anyways…
I’ve worked at the UN and can say with confidence this was easily as diverse a pool as you see in NY. Everyone’s shared interest in China and English fluency gave folks a starting point to engage on
In my year there really wasn’t a lot of drinking and in particular binge drinking (it’s not part of campus culture in China and most students outside America just drink to excess a lot less) compared to what you’d see at an MBA program in the west.
Yenching’s structure makes it much more straightforward to integrate with the broader campus. Two years allows you time to really invest in regular PKU campus clubs. The most fun I had was playing with the badminton club, painting with the landscape painting club, and spending every weekend for six months rehearsing for a production of Hamilton with the musical club. Yenching has no dedicated cafeteria so you’ll eat all your meals mixing broadly with the student body.
Yenching vs Schwarzman (Dorms, Career Services)
Perhaps the important difference is the length of the program. Schwarzman is a one year program, which really only gives you nine months on campus, too short a period of time for many to make real progress on Mandarin or uncover a job offer required to stay in China after graduation.
Schwarzman has a higher percentage of Americans (40% in 2021) and far more internationals who have exposure to the US, making its social culture much more westernized. For example, of the mainland Chinese students in the class of 2021, only five of twenty-four Chinese nationals did their undergrad on the mainland, with most of the others having gone to school in the US or the UK. This led many Schwarzman scholars in my era to lament (/celebrate) that school is just like home.
The bar for ‘interest in China’ is much lower in Schwarzman (it’s more oriented to produce ‘leaders’ who ‘understand’ Asia), as a far higher percentage of students come into the program having never studied Chinese. Many of its faculty are flown in for a year or two from the west and don’t really have much of a China background (this may have changed by the looks of their faculty page it seems they now have more Tsinghua profs).
Schwarzman in general keeps you much busier than Yenching, with more mandatory lectures, career development sessions etc. They also import western profs to stay for a few years, many of whom have zero China background.
Schwarzman’s campus is the nicest building I ever visited in China, and even puts Yale’s residential colleges to shame. It has centrally filtered air and water, something even the nicest banks in China can’t boast of. Its gym is Equinox-level and their campus features its own cafeteria that’s mostly western food. It also is literally a castle, with some pretty professional security that checks everyone who enters. This whole setup leads Schwarzman students to spend a lot less time interacting with other Tsinghua students (at one point there was a contest for who could not leave campus for the longest period of time…) and breeds more low-level resentment in the broader campus that these westerners have way better amenities than their Chinese counterparts. Yenching’s dorm setup, in contrast, partially takes over some floors of a rough-around-the-edges campus hotel but we had to deal with random middle-aged Chinese folks who were often smoking in their rooms…
In terms of career services, Schwarzman is on par with top western grad schools. They hired a senior career services professional with decades of experience at Booth and Yale’s SOM to stand up the program and that investment has paid off for students looking, in particular, to go into traditional corporate routes in the west. Schwarzman has structured on-campus recruiting for the big banks and consulting firms. Big backers of the institution like Ray Dalio (Bridgewater) and of course Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) wregularly hire out of the program.
Yenching’s career services, in contrast, is bare-bones. The only people in my year who ended up in bulge bracket banks or top consulting firms had offers going into the program. In general, Yenching’s student body has a more academic bent, with more students ending up in PhD programs or law school.
Neither program is particularly good at finding placements for students in Chinese firms. Bytedance is far and away the most common domestic firm that picks up internationals from Schwarzman and Yenching.
Why Go To Yenching?
If you want a way to get into China, not have to teach English, and have two years of funding where you can pretty much choose your own adventure
If you want to make an incredible group of friends who share your interest in China
Why Not Go To Yenching?
If you don’t really care about China (you’ll have to put up with a fair amount of BS that will be off-putting to anyone who doesn’t appreciate that it comes with the territory with anything official on the mainland)
If you want to be taught things in grad school (which isn’t to say you can’t learn things, you just need to be more proactive than at a western program)
Other Notes
From Wikipedia: “While Tsinghua Schwarzman expects to raise about US$550 million (originally 300 million) from mostly foreign donors for its endowment, it is understood that the Peking Yenching endowment is even better funded through significant donations from Chinese philanthropists and special grants from the Chinese Central Government.” Schwarzman College has lots of rooms named after westerners and a big plaque in front showcasing all of its major donors (a real who’s who of billionaires and multinationals). Aside from Robin Li (Baidu’s CEO), I don’t know of any other particular funders for Yenching and to be honest, would be pretty shocked if it had a larger endowment than Schwarzman. For both programs, the whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding mostly foreigners to spend a year or two in China when there’s so much that needs better funding in the broader Chinese educational system is more than a little off-putting…
Why not go to Yenching?
As someone who chose a fully Chinese-taught Master’s degree, I feel obliged to give a few reasons you might consider that route instead of Yenching!
- Deeper immersion: If your classmates and friends all speak Chinese, and you're forced to write essays in Chinese, your language skills will improve waaay faster, and you'll avoid the Anglophone bubble that many international programs create. Also, classes seem more interesting when you're trying to master a language!
- A clearer view of China: Having classmates from all over the country from different social classes, you'll get a better sense of the diversity of 20-somethings in China. You'll also get some insights into university politics. Our first student meeting at the Humanities Department turned into a struggle session because someone dared suggest that the student union committee selection process was undemocratic.
- More distinctive experiences: I spent many long weekends throughout my MA in Miao villages getting hideously drunk with classmates and local officials. Admittedly, that may be down to my choice of field (ethnology/anthropology at Guizhou University!), but I guess that the integration of a fully-Chinese program opens the door to this sort of thing.
So interesting to learn more about these programs.
For those who have studied Chinese and would like to pursue a graduate degree in political science, economics, international law, environment, resources and energy (ERE) with a China focus, I would also recommend the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a fully bilingual community established between Nanjing University and Johns Hopkins SAIS, featuring a mix of Chinese and international students. International students complete most of their coursework and (for the master's) their thesis in Mandarin with academic freedom.