北大清华抢生源斯文扫地

This is the Education Ministry's first response to recent news story about Peking University's recruitment team in Sichuan province accusing Tsinghua's Sichuan recruiters of "luring students to Tsinghua with money." The allegations were first published on Sina Weibo and later attracted wider public attention.

Xiong Bingqi, Vice dean of the 21st century education research institute, says the lack of a proper autonomous enrollment system is mainly responsible for the improper recruitment behaviors.

"Under the current college enrollment system, the universities are not authorized to have independent recruitment. To recruit good students, the universities have only to focus on the scores while having no better evaluation method of the students' performances. As a result, recruiting personnel will try every means in persuading the students with high scores to choose them while the students are filing their applications."

Pecking University also implied that Tsinghua's recruitment team called the top 10 scorers of the recent college entrance exams, or gaokao, and lied that PKU would not be able to place them in their desired programs, and says that Tsinghua has broken its promises to perspective students several times in the past five years.

Tsinghua's Sichuan recruiter forwarded the post and claimed that PKU was the one that was attempting to "buy" students with money.

These posts received thousands of comments and forwards in a short time, quickly climbing to the top of the list among trending topics.

It is not the first time top universities launched battles for top students in China. Recruitment teams contact top students even before scores are released, offering them campus tours, inquiring about their desired programs and persuading them to join.

Xiong says if Chinese universities do not find a way to improve their overall quality, recruitment will get even harder.

"There are three kinds of students who give up during the whole Gaokao process. Those who give up taking the exam mostly chose to study abroad. There are students who give up after taking the exam mostly because they could not get in their desired college. And there are other students who got admitted but decided not to go. Why do the three kinds of "giving up" exist? It's all related to the quality of our higher education. If the school can't provide high quality education with characteristics, students tend to abandon it."

Back in 2012, China's Education Ministry issued regulations forbidding several bad behaviors, including bribery, in university recruitment.