Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Recent data shows that Chinese students have one of the lowest rates of being awarded a "First," or top degree, at UK universities. But more disturbing is that many of them fail to get any degree at all.

Drop-out rates for students from the mainland studying overseas are as high as 25 percent even at Ivy League colleges in the US, and there are estimates from educationalists that the overall rate may be around 40 percent. This is in stark contrast to the drop-out rate of British or American-born Chinese, which is a mere 5 percent.

Many have blamed the difficulty of cultural adaptation and different learning styles. But I believe many of these students are doomed before they even arrive. The truth is that a vast number of the students the mainland sends overseas would struggle to succeed at a Chinese university. Forcing them to learn in another language is almost sadistic.

Particularly at the undergraduate level, a lot of these students failed China's toughest hurdle, the national college entrance examinations, or at least didn't get into the kind of school their parents considered acceptable. The chance of Western education offers a social and professional alternative.

How, then, do they get into Western schools? Simple; they lie. Western colleges have no way of realistically evaluating the qualifications of Chinese applicants. Not only are they unfamiliar with Chinese schools and exams, they have little ability to do due diligence and check that a student's credentials are what they claim to be.

According to the Times Higher Education, research in 2011 by the Association of International Educators investigated the applications to US colleges of 250 mainland students, finding that 90 percent of recommendation letters were fake, 70 percent of application essays were not written by the applicant, half of all transcripts were doctored, and numerous awards and prizes were faked. Parents pay tens of thousands of yuan to education agencies, some of which effectively create the students' records from scratch.

But even legitimate Chinese education operates at standards far below that of respectable academia. Plagiarism, scientific fraud, and outright invention are terrifyingly common, even among professors. With these kind of models, students end up with deficient standards that run up against the much tougher rules at foreign universities.

Take one Peking University graduate student, whose original application letter for a scientific course, before a kindly foreigner I know changed it, bluntly stated "No matter what the data, I can derive a significant result."

And control of access to legitimate programs and scholarships is often handed over by trusting foreign institutions to their Chinese counterparts, making who gets them more dependent on guanxi (connections) or cash than anything else.

This can lead to hilarious culture clashes, like a fuerdai (rich kid) acquaintance recently kicked out of university in Delaware for trying to bribe his professor after he failed the year. "I don't understand," he complained when he got home, "What did I do wrong?"

English skills are another severe weakness. Studies by consulting firm Zinch China show that the language skills of prospective applicants have actually dropped sharply over the last few years.

This has been covered up by "educational" institutions geared toward learning the test-taking skills needed to pass the IELTS or the TOEFL.

New Oriental classes, for instance, do little to improve real language skills, but give the students enough rote learning to scrape the needed 6 in the test.

And even if a student cannot get that, London and New York have plenty of semi-legitimate "language schools" to give them a bump before they enroll for a "real degree."

But all this wouldn't exist without the compliance of Western education institutions. The reason admission standards are so low, and a blind eye so often turned to fake applications, is that Western schools are desperate for the cash Chinese students bring.

Schools have no interest in turning down applicants when they come loaded with sweet tuition money. In the end, Chinese students con schools into taking them, and then those schools con them out of their cash for a third-rate education.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn