Until the beginning of the 20th century, by passing exams on knowledge of Confucian works and proving their ability to navigate general political issues, any subject of the empire, even from the poorest family, had the opportunity to enter government service. Given that the position of an official was the dream of many Chinese, candidates for this position devoted all their time to studying from childhood.
This psychology has partly survived to this day. Only if earlier successfully overcoming tests meant entering government service, now what is at stake is admission to a university, and therefore, promising employment. Which institute or university one can enter depends on how well the applicant passed the exam – a kind of analogue of the Russian Unified State Exam. The higher his scores, the greater the chance of getting into the country's elite universities.
In China, children are prepared for subsequent studies starting from kindergarten, which often resembles boarding schools where students return home only on weekends. According to China expert Don Starr from Durham University, this preparation consists of teaching children from a very young age extreme concentration and the ability to absorb large amounts of information. Subsequently, these skills allow them to successfully prepare for the final exam.
Despite optimistic reports from the Chinese authorities about the continued expansion of the higher education system, many experts and ordinary Chinese do not consider the situation rosy. As researchers Haiying Dong from Arizona State University and Xuehong Wan from Sichuan University showed in their work (.pdf), behind the numbers indicating the explosive development of the education sector lie serious shortcomings. The root cause of these imbalances, the authors claim, was the state's attempt to save on university funding. To this end, in 1989, a number of institutions that had previously provided free education began to introduce tuition fees. In 1997, this practice was extended to all state universities in the country.
In addition to state universities, there are also private institutes in China. According to the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, in 1997 there were about 20 private educational institutions in the country. By 2010, their number had grown to 630. Unlike the Western model, where private universities are considered more prestigious than public ones, in China it is the opposite. Although such institutions generally set higher fees, they are mainly designed for those applicants who could not score enough points to enter state universities.
Although state allocations to institutes and universities grew over time, their share in the overall funding of institutions gradually decreased. At the same time, the financial burden on students, on the contrary, continued to rise, so that at some point, despite relatively low fees, higher education became unaffordable for a significant part of the population, which remains low-income. As a result, while in the 1980s the share of rural students was about 30 percent, by 2004 it had fallen to 19.2 percent, even though at that time almost 60 percent of China's total population lived outside cities.
The situation is compounded by the fact that, despite the declared policy of universal equality, in practice applicants from rural families face inflated requirements. According to The New York Times, prestigious Chinese universities usually favor teenagers from wealthy urban families, demanding higher scores from children of low-income parents. Meanwhile, the shortage of school teachers in remote regions significantly reduces the chances of local residents to achieve even average results.
All this leads to the fact that rural children end up in lower-tier institutes, whose fees are even higher than in elite institutions. This paradoxical situation arises because, when distributing state allocations, preference is given to the most successful universities, which, as a result, can afford to set lower tuition fees.
Meanwhile, another negative trend has emerged in recent years. Essentially, it is about an oversupply of specialists with higher education on the Chinese labor market: having set out to develop the university system, the country's authorities overdid it and created too many educational institutions. Amid slowing economic growth (in 2012, China's GDP growth was 7.8 percent versus 14.2 percent in 2007), this led to about 65 percent of bachelor's graduates and 74 percent of master's graduates being unemployed in 2013, writes Time. Having spent a large amount of money, by local standards, on education, newly minted bachelors and masters are forced to take any job, no matter how menial, the income from which barely covers the cost of renting housing in the city.
Most likely, in the near future, Chinese universities will bring real benefits only to a select few – wealthy foreigners, as well as children of already successful Chinese with extensive connections. As for ordinary citizens, entering a university remains more of a lottery for them: more often, employers demand not the certified specialists produced by universities, but simple technicians, without whose hands many enterprises would stop.
Valentin MAKOV.
Lenta.ru