Bridging Global Education Gaps from the Inside Out

“As a student, I was always told to dream globally. But no one gave me a map.”

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That’s how my journey began—from a small city in Southern China to "classrooms" in San Francisco, Seoul, Berlin, London, Beijing, and Buenos Aires. I joined Minerva University as one of the few students from a Chinese public high school, I was drawn by the promise that global learning could reshape not only what I knew, but who I could become.

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What I didn’t expect was how opaque and exclusionary global education systems could be—especially for students like me. International education often assumes a shared knowledge of how to apply, how to self-advocate, and how to navigate systems designed for a very specific kind of mobility and privilege. It celebrates diversity, yet rarely provides the infrastructure to support those from the margins.

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For instance, many Chinese students face linguistic and financial hurdles—they have no access to English-language mentors, limited support in preparing for standardized tests like the SAT, and a lack of clear information about global scholarships. I had no roadmap, just curiosity and persistence.

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So I built the tools I wish I’d had.

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In 2022, I co-founded OneXplore, a youth-led platform designed to help Chinese students access international education through free scholarship databases, multilingual explainer content, and peer mentorship programs. We’ve since supported thousands of students across China—from rural provinces to urban public schools—many of whom had never believed global education was possible for them. Some received full-ride scholarships to attend universities abroad. Others participated in summer exchange programs or applied for gap year initiatives they had never heard of before.

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But access is only part of the equation. The other is narrative.

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Even as more students' cross borders, the dominant narratives in global education still rarely include youth from underrepresented geographies—especially when it comes to their own voices. Most of the stories I read were about youth, not by youth. And those that did emerge often centered trauma, rather than agency or imagination.

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To respond to this, I founded the Tilting Futures Chinese Media Center, now one of the largest youth storytelling hubs in China. Over the past two years, we’ve published more than 600 original stories written by young people navigating education, gender, identity, and migration. Many of our contributors are first-generation university students, rural youth, or members of marginalized communities who have been left out of dominant media frameworks. Some write in Mandarin, others in English, but all reclaim their voice as storytellers of their own lived realities.

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In one of our recent stories, a girl from a remote town in Guizhou shared how she fought to stay in school while working part-time to support her siblings. In another, a young queer student wrote about finding hope through a cross-cultural arts program. These aren’t stories you’ll find in most international development reports, but they reveal the real texture of youth resilience and dreams.

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As I prepare to begin my master’s at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) this fall, I carry these stories with me. I plan to continue working at the intersection of youth, education, and public policy—to challenge the systems that still treat access as a privilege instead of a right.

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But most importantly, I want to keep building youth-led spaces where education is not reduced to exams or institutions, but reimagined as a tool for equity, self-expression, and solidarity. Spaces where young people don’t just receive opportunities but shape them—together.

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Education transformation is not a top-down process. It happens when youth start asking: What if we did things differently? What if we created our own platforms? What if the next generation of global changemakers came from the very places that have been excluded for so long?

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My story is just one among many. But if it can remind one more student that they, too, can belong, can lead, can imagine—then it’s worth sharing.

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Let’s keep building, together.