American universities and Chinese universities have very different admission requirements. American universities, most of them, offer fall term and spring term enrollments, and some schools even offer winter term or summer term enrollments as well. When they make a decision of whether to admit an applicant, they consider the applicant’s GPA and SAT score, and sometimes give privileges to students who demonstrate their achievements on extra curricula activities. Because most of American universities accept both types of freshman and transfer students, students who are not able to enroll at a four-year university right after they graduate from high school can still apply for universities as transfer students while they finish certain courses in a community college and meet the transfer students requirements. Besides that, many universities in America also offer re-entry and readmission. Therefore, students in America have many opportunities and ways to pursue their higher education in the United States; in contrast, students in China have very limited paths to earn a bachelor’s degree in their home country. Due to the lack of universities for the huge amount of applicants, Chinese universities have very simple but strict admission requirements. All of the official accredited universities in China only offer fall term enrollment, and none of them accepts transfer students. The only criteria that affects a school’ decision on whether to admit a student is the GAOKAO test, which is only held once a year. This means that students who failed their GAOKAO test have no way to enroll in an accredited university in China unless they go back to enroll in a high school and retake the GAOKAO test in the next year. As a result, faced with the strict Chinese university admission requirements, many students in China gave up their college dreams.
In addition, American universities have a very different structure of the education system