China is the new frontier for Bishop Hendricken High School.

In the last seven years the all-boys school has seen its Chinese student enrollment grow from zero to 35. By this fall, Vice Principal David Flanagan expects the school could have as many as 42 students from China.

It’s no fluke that Chinese families are learning about Hendricken. By the time they have paid for tuition, board and housing, they are shelling out upwards of $45,000 a year for an American high school education. Flanagan has made five recruiting trips to China since 2008, most recently this winter, when he visited five cities in 16 days. Two of the boys he interviewed were granted admission upon his return, while others are on the list for consideration with follow-up interviews via Skype.

Flanagan also met with the mother of one student currently enrolled at Hendricken who had learned of his visit and traveled some distance to talk with him about her son’s performance and grades that troubled her. Flanagan needed a translator to meet with and reassure the concerned mother.

The objectives of the Chinese and Hendricken are remarkably similar. The goal of the Chinese families is for their sons to attend an American university and not only earn a degree but gain an understanding of American culture that will give them an advantage in finding a job and competing in the global economy when they return home. This is not usually a case where the Chinese are looking to immigrate to this country, said Flanagan.

Flanagan sees another reason for the terrific interest in gaining acceptance to an American university: it’s far more probable than acceptance at a Chinese institution.

“In China, it’s hyper-competitive. Everything is geared to a national examination, and that’s going to determine whether you get a spot,” he said.

Flanagan put the odds at a remarkable 165,000 university placements for an average of 20 million high school graduates annually.

While the Chinese represent a huge resource of motivated, intelligent and financially capable students, the goal at Hendricken is to expose its students to the Chinese and for them to build relationships and understanding that will serve them globally.

“We live in a new world right now,” Hendricken Principal Jay Brennan said. “The world is just so small. Kids are going to be competing in an international market for jobs.”

While there is no set policy, Flanagan sees no more than 5 percent of the school’s enrollment of 940 being Chinese. Hendricken has teamed up with the Roosevelt International Academy based in Providence and the Cross Cultural Network (CCN) to enable the dramatic enrollment in Chinese students.

CCN recruits families to serve as hosts for the students, paying them for room and board. Fewer than half of the Hendricken Chinese students are with host families. The majority reside with RIA, where in addition to housing and board in a facility that was formally operated for assisted elderly living they receive language instruction, tutoring and help with their homework.

Founded by Benjamin Ben Tre and Jonas Norr, RIA has been operational for the past three years. Through its partnership with public and private high schools, it provides housing and programs for 115 students who are mostly Asian.

Ben Tre said there is a growing interest in international education, and those in the program are looking to continue their education in an American college or university.

“It is important to promote social and cultural exchange,” Tre said. He said students are being introduced to American ideas and values, which he feels are important to promoting world understanding.

Although a Catholic school, conversion to Catholicism is not an objective of the Hendricken program. Some students have chosen to be baptized and have taken their first communion, Brennan said.

“They come here from a world where there is no religion,” he said. Chinese students are required to attend religious courses, but they are treated as history and theology.

“It’s an education, not indoctrination,” Brennan said.

Five Chinese will receive their Hendricken diplomas at graduation June 5 at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Providence. Among them will be Shengyi Chen, who was given the name Jack by an English teacher in fourth grade in his hometown not too far from Shanghai. Chen, an only child, learned of Hendricken at a high school fair in China and was interested because, unlike schools in Boston and New York that were also represented, Rhode Island is a “quiet place, and this is a Blue Ribbon school.”

Chen said English was difficult, and he often was homesick in his freshman year. That’s changed now that he has his group of friends, and he knows where he will be going in the fall. Chen has been accepted to the University of Maryland, where he will study computer science. He won’t receive any scholarship aid, meaning his parents will be paying the full freight as they have for his high school education.

It hasn’t been easy on them. His father is a banker and his mother works as a college teacher.

“They work very hard,” Chen said.

Chen would like to stay in this country, and he says his parents would be interested in retiring here. They have visited several times and he, as a rule, returns to China for the summer.

He can’t work here, although for pocket change he fixes the cell phones and laptops of friends. And of major disappointment is that he is not permitted to get a license and drive here. He finds public transportation lacking.

Like a proud father, Flanagan listens to Chen, adding that his English has improved dramatically since that first year at Hendricken. He also commiserated with Chen over the ban on driving.

“They’ve done very well,” Flanagan says of the group that will graduate this year.

There have been and are other foreign students at Hendricken, including boys from Columbia, Panama and European countries. Up until the economy took a turn, Koreans constituted the major segment of foreign students from Asia. Today, it is the Chinese.

For the most part, Flanagan said the Chinese applying to attend Hendricken come from middle class parents in their late 30s and 40s, both of whom work and “have reaped the benefits of a growing China.” In recent years he has found more of those applying to Hendricken have younger siblings, whereas with the one-child policy that was not the case five and six years ago.

“The majority [of the Chinese students] say they want to go back,” Flanagan said. “Once they are fluent in the way things are here, it gives them a huge advantage back in China.”

Sciences, math, engineering and business, Flanagan said, are the group’s predominant areas of interest.

Flanagan believes of all private and parochial Rhode Island high schools, Hendricken has the largest group of Chinese students. He noted that Mount St. Charles, Bay View Academy and St. Raphael have programs and that on the level of higher education both URI and Bryant have developed programs aimed at Chinese.

For the most part, he said, Chinese graduating from Hendricken choose to leave the state.

“They are looking for bigger schools [than what Rhode Island can offer],” he said.

As for Chinese wanting to come to Hendricken, Flanagan says there’s an unlimited supply.

“They’re coming here to prepare for college. That’s what we do best,” he said.