China's richest teacher plans to purchase colleges

BEIJING: China's richest teacher, Yu Minhong, dubbed as the godfather of overseas studies, plans to buy one or two colleges to further expand his educational empire, the state media reported on Tuesday.

Yu, president of the Beijing-based New Oriental School (NOS), became the country's richest teacher due to the NOS's 110-million-US-dollar IPO in New York on September 6th.
    
He says the funds will also be used to pay down the school's previous debts, Xinhua news agency reported.

NOS has a network of 25 schools, and more than 110 learning centres and employs some 1,700 teachers in 24 cities in China.

"NOS will continue to focus on English training only. The purchase of the colleges would, hopefully, allow us to issue educational certificates to our students in the future," Yu said.

The NOS's website says it has had over three million enrolments including 800,000 in 2005 alone. It trains Chinese students who want to go abroad by preparing them for English examinations such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

The school was sued in 2001 by US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) for publishing and selling ETS's test questions for non-English-speaking students.

The Higher People's Court of Beijing ordered in 2005, NOS pay 450,000 US dollars to ETS in compensation.