ENLIGHTENING YOUNG MINDS: Sun Wei (right), Chair of Guizhou Forerunner College, talks with two potential applicants to his college during a home visit in Xujiaba Village, Sinan County, Guizhou Province, on July 29 (SUN FENG)

"My work experience in the academic arena and business world enables me to find resources for my students," said Sun. Through the efforts of Sun and his colleagues, every new student has been given a laptop donated by HP China, and each laptop features software donated by Microsoft China. Nielsen donated the IT equipment used on the campus worth a total of 3 million yuan ($468,750).

Sun said he was in talks with Baidu, the world's most-used Chinese search engine, which is willing to help the GFC by offering students internship opportunities and scholarships.

Sun firmly believes in the model of education expounded by Plato. "If you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy, that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly." Sun requires his students to participate in manual labor one day per week to cultivate their work ethic, and learn self-governance, self-restraint and self-discipline.

In October, Sun launched a campaign to recruit volunteer janitors from his students. He intends to keep all the campus lavatories as clean as those in star-rated hotels just by using volunteers, while the campus will have only two fulltime janitors.

Unexpected challenges

To make sure that each graduate will be employed with a reasonable salary immediately after graduation, the GFC has found partner companies for all of its majors. Collaborating enterprises will not only send veteran employees to train students, but also offer internship opportunities to students and hire qualified graduates. For example, the School of Hotel Management is partnered with the Marriott Hotel, which has promised to hire all the qualified graduates to work in its hotels in China's major cities.

Sun said that one of the biggest challenges in the preparation period was persuading poverty-stricken families to send their children to the GFC. "Parents, sometimes even teachers in rural schools, think our scholarships and employment policies are too good to be true," Sun told Beijing Review.

Sun said the GFC's private college status hindered its efforts to recruit students.With a history of less than 30 years in China, the private higher education sector has been plagued by financial scandals and allegations of poor education quality.

"I think it will take two to three years for local people to fully trust us," Sun said. The GFC plans to recruit about 600 students next year from Guizhou and its neighboring provinces.

Sun and his colleagues look forward to the release of a national regulation on private colleges and universities, which will divide them into for-profit and non-profit organizations and provide non-profit ones with public subsidies and tax breaks.

"Some other students rejected us because we are not authorized by education authorities to grant a bachelor's degree, which they believe guarantees a well-paid job," Sun said. At the end of July, he paid home visits to about 20 potential applicants to his college who live deep in Guizhou's mountainous areas. He found that most of these youngsters, whose homes are usually a two-hour walk from the nearest road, saw a university degree a guarantee of a better life and had never heard of the difficulties facing millions of unemployed or low-earning college graduates who live in cramped conditions on the outskirts of China's large cities.

Sun also found that what seems like exciting professional opportunities to most urban residents didn't resonate with these rural youngsters. For example, very few of the students he met were excited about job opportunities at Marriott Hotels as neither they nor their parents had ever seen a five-star hotel.

However, these poor students' lack of knowledge about the outside world only served to convince Sun and his colleagues that they were bridging a vital education gap.

"This is the first time I saw abject poverty personally. It is shocking. Seeing the smile on the youngsters' face when they knew that their tuitions would be exempted, I felt that my job was really meaningful," said Anny Chang, a GFC employee who paid home visits to promote the college.

While Sun thought it would be difficult to instill loving, ethical and moral components in his students' campus lives, he told Beijing Review that he was proved wrong. "I asked all my students to make three etiquette changes by always wearing a smile, greeting strangers politely and speaking standard Mandarin Chinese or English instead of local dialects on the campus, and they have done very well so far," Sun said.

The recruitment of volunteer teachers was surprisingly easy for the GFC's founding team. About a dozen of foreign volunteers greeted students at the college's opening ceremony, ranging from retired university professors to former senior executives of multinational companies.

"My goal is that half of our faculty will be volunteers and veteran employees from our partner companies," said Sun, who is a volunteer himself. "As so many people from China and abroad are applying to work here as volunteers, it won't take long to realize this goal."