A Chinese Company Quietly Bought Some Of America’s Most Popular College Prep Tutors
A Chinese private-equity firm quietly purchased two popular tutoring services used to prepare students for college entry exams such as the SAT and ACT, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In January 2022, Primavera Capital Group, based in Hong Kong, bought Princeton Review and Tutor.com from ST Unitas, a Korean education company, according to the WSJ. Recently, the U.S. has closely monitored Chinese companies’ purchases over concerns of national security and data privacy.
There were no press releases detailing the purchases in 2022 and the tutoring services recently updated their websites to include references to Primavera Capital Group, the outlet reported.
It is unclear whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a group that reviews the threat of foreign purchases of entities, is reviewing Primavera Capital Group’s recent investment, the WSJ reported. The committee is “committed to taking all necessary actions within its authority to safeguard U.S. national security,” a Treasury Department spokesperson told the outlet.
Tutor.com, a service of Princeton Review, provides free tutoring and college prep to the Department of Defense and U.S. military personnel while additionally serving several school districts and education departments within the United States, according to the organization’s website. The education service collects information on its tutors and clients including names, addresses, recording of meetings and IP addresses, the WSJ reported.
Tutor.com partners with several well-known and sizable school districts including Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, Fresno Unified School District in California and Los Angeles Unified School District in California, the second largest school system in the country, the organization’s website showed.
Chinese companies are becoming more uncomfortable as the U.S. begins to make their purchases public out of concern for the nation’s security, the WSJ reported.
“There’s reason for that hype,” Elly Rostoum, a former U.S. intelligence analyst, told the outlet. “There’s reason for the U.S. to be worried about those transactions.”
In addition to the tutoring services, Chinese ties to U.S. entities have recently come to light; one of Virginia’s most prestigious high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School has received more than $1 million in donations from Chinese interests since 2014, according to a report by Parents Defending Education, a parental rights in education group.
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, a popular social media platform, has come under fire for its Chinese ties. U.S. lawmakers have threatened to ban the app over national security concerns.
Princeton Review, Tutor.com and Primavera Capital Group did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Why do we let China keep influencing our youth and infiltrating our institutions and infrastructure? Because many of our Politicians and most of our giant international corporations (Disney, Nike, Coca Cola, Pepsi, even Hollywood and the NBA) are compromised by China and the money that they make there and so they bow to the CCP. The CCP even censors and openly threatens them if they dare to speak anything negative about China. Obviously Biden is compromised by the tens of millions he and his crackhead son made from a Chinese energy company when Biden was VP. As so, that’s why he lets a China spy balloon violate our air space and fly over the entirety of our nuclear air and missile defense sites in multiple states across the country before taking action.
We should be equally concerned with why are we allowing them to buy unlimited land in the U.S. and purchase some of our biggest food suppliers? I.E., the biggest pork producer in the country (Smithfield Ham) is now owned by China. Not to mention the 350,000 Chinese students in the U.S. (studying STEM courses not “gender studies”) that will end up being employed in the government or by our defense contractors and are bound by Chinese law to spy for the CCP if asked. Tic Tok is a Chinese intelligence gathering and propaganda social media site and should be banned. The Chinese are embedded throughout our government (Fang Fang slept with Swalwell and Dianne Feinstein had a Chinese spy working for her for 20 years), they steal our intellectual property and technology with impunity, and now have hypersonic missiles that we don’t even have yet. They are building infrastructure in countries all over the world, especially in South America, to make them indebted to China while we waste billions of dollars and military hardware on never ending regime change wars. And, oh yeah, that war in Ukraine has caused them to become strong allies with Russia in the worst possible relationship against us and the worst alliance for the rest of the world. Smart move. The Chinese stated goal (not Russia’s) is total word domination and we better start paying attention.