Though this is the most common narrative concerning what's going on, it's also a narrative for which we don't have a lot of objectively verifiable evidence. I've been reading all the articles I can find about these issues, and I've never come across even one administrator who writes, "I wish we could accept fewer Chinese students, but we just need the money."

Chinese people apply to, get into, and succeed in American universities. As well, it seems that their grades once they get in tend to be comparable to the grades of non-Chinese students. Whether or not they played by the same rules, they are just as likely to succeed in our universities as anyone else.

And as witoldc says, even if 95% of Chinese students just want to go to college to jump through the next hoop in life, how is that any different from 95% of American students who go to college?

Here are the facts:

• This wave of Chinese students at the undergraduate level in US universities is huge, new, and probably not going away.
• Once they get in, statistics show that they are just about as likely to succeed academically as any other student.
• US universities do need to get better sifting through Chinese applicants in order to be able to tell which are stronger or weaker applicants. All of this is pretty new. They haven't yet gotten the time to get better at it.

There is cheating in China. That's not news. Applications to colleges are presentations of a self and are going to be manipulated by various methods to get past the admissions offices. This is true no matter where the applications come from. Instead of judging a facet of another culture as immoral, we should build a system to better find the best applicants, which is what we already seek to do anyway.

And once they arrive in the States, we need to make sure they understand the new rules and the consequences for breaking them and then treat them like anyone else.