Students from rural areas are finding it difficult to gain access to China's top universities due to the country's unbalanced education system.(File Photo/CFP)
Three decades after China began undertaking economic reforms, young people from less privileged backgrounds still find attending the country's elite colleges a dream out of reach.
The stereotype that the poorer one is, the worse university he or she will attend, is being reinforced even more by today's China, in spite of the equalizing effect that national examinations and economic growth are supposed to bring.
Southern China Weekend magazine, citing a survey by Liu Yunshan, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Peking University, said the proportion of students from rural areas to the total student population at his university declined from 30% in 1978-1998 to about 10% in the last decade.
Liu said the 1980s were a time of great opportunity for young people, who could shape their own destinies through education. During those years, rural students made up 20%-40% of the student population of Peking University, one of the top universities in the country.
The situation is the same with another elite Beijing institution, Tsinghua University. Students from rural areas made up only 17% of the freshmen there in 2010, even though they accounted for 62% of students that took the national college entrance examinations that year, according to a survey conducted by Tsinghua students under the direction of Jin Jun, a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Science at Tsinghua University.
According to Jin, a typical student at Tsinghua University hails from cities, with parents working as teachers or government employees, and travels overseas with his or her parents at least once a year. Some of them had studied overseas before being admitted to the elite school.
In another survey conducted by Jin in Shaanxi province, he found that of the 2010 freshmen at Tsinghua and Peking University who came from the central Chinese province, more than 97% were graduates of five elite high schools in Xi'an, the capital.
Lian Si, a scholar at the Center for Chinese & Global Affairs under Peking University, said the center set up a program in which students were encouraged to write a paper about their rural hometowns while on vacation, in return for a free rail ticket home.
"This program ground to a halt this year because few students enrolled in it, thanks to the scarcity of students from rural areas," Lian said.
Liu Yunshan added that instead of offering opportunities to young people from rural areas to move up social classes through education, the tertiary education system is reinforcing the social divide in the country.
