“Chinese companies are taking advantage of America’s financially strapped higher-education system to buy schools, and the latest deal for a classical music conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey, is striking chords of dissonance on campus,” report Bruce Einhorn and Hui Li in Tuesday’s (3/20) Bloomberg News. “Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Co. agreed in February to pay $40 million for Westminster Choir College. The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school whose choirs sang with maestros Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini and Seiji Ozawa. Alumni are among those suing in New York federal court to block the sale, saying it violates Westminster’s 1991 merger agreement with Rider [University] and will trigger the choir college’s demise…. Westminster is at least the fourth college site bought by Chinese interests since 2015…. An affiliate of NCF Capital Ltd. agreed in August to pay about $26 million for the former home of Dowling College in Oakdale, New York…. In 2015, Jiahui Education bought the shuttered Chester College of New England and rebranded it Busche Academy, an international school for elementary- and high-school students.”
Posted March 22, 2018
