A Critical Note to College Admission Offices

from FBLA China

To College Admission Offices,

This is a critical note from the China Coordination Office of Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) regarding FBLA’s competitive system in China.

FBLA is the world’s largest business student and career education organization (http://www.fbla-pbl.org). Every year, there are more than 250,000 high school students from 5000+ school chapters across states participating in its competitive events.

FBLA China is authorized and responsible for coordinating the school chapters in China mainland and organizing the China regional FBLA competition. China is recognized as an international region of FBLA and affiliated to FBLA National with a state level membership.

Every year, there are two rounds of competitions at China’s regional level. Students first register in their own school chapters and then participate in the preliminary round at provincial/domestic region level. The top four teams of each province/domestic region in each competitive event will advance to the China national final round. And only the champion of the China national final round can represent China competing in FBLA’s national leadership conference.

To critically point out, besides the formal competitive system, for a branding purpose, the FBLA Headquarter gives a few NLC wildcard spots every year to third-party education institutions so that a few numbers of students, who cannot pass their school chapter’s own selection process and the China regional level competition, can still go to NLC to experience and observe the events as long as the students pay a premium to the institutions.

Please critically note:

•  These special students for wildcard are registered under third-party education institutions instead of under their own schools.
•  Obtaining the NLC wildcard spots requires no selection process. Students can get the spots as long as they pay an extremely high premium to those for-profit education institutions.
•  These students’ participation and presence via wildcard spots in FBLA’s NLC cannot justify any of the students’ abilities and competitiveness in the FBLA competition.
•  Please be careful about any FBLA experiences in Chinese students’ applications and please refer to FBLA China’s official website and Certification Lookup System to check and verify the credibility of their contest awards and competition experiences. Students for the wildcard spots and via third-party education institutions will not be included and recognized in FBLA China’s system.

We have the responsibility of protecting the interests of the real FBLA students who worked hard and outperformed in the FBLA competition.

This note is sent out to US and UK college admission offices on September 15th 2018 and published on FBLA China website September 19th 2018.