Subject: [China] - Poor students pay *higher*
fees than rich students
Ridiculous. A system well screwed-up. Human greed and
corruption.
http://www.todayonline.com/chinaindia/china/poor-parents-china-sacrifice-their-incomes-child-college
HANJING (China) — Mr Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts
practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill
for US$500 (S$618) a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic
tunnels, with one goal in mind: Paying for his daughter’s
education.
His wife toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during
apple season in May and June. She earns US$12 a day tying little
plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to
protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a
substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going
towards their daughter’s education.
Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job,
because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last
decade.
Their daughter, Ms Wu Caoying, now a 19-year-old college
sophomore, has chosen to major in logistics, a growing industry in
China as ever more families order online instead of visiting
stores.
The major is the most popular at her school, which could signal
a future glut in the field. Among those who graduated last spring
from her polytechnic in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, “50
or 60 per cent of them still do not have a job”, said Ms Wu.
Their daughter is also ambivalent about staying in school, where
the tuition, room and board cost more than half the couple’s
combined annual income. A slightly above-average student, she
thinks of dropping out, finding a job and earning money.
“Every time my daughter calls home, she says, ‘I don’t want to
continue this’,” Mrs Wu said. “I say, ‘You’ve got to keep studying
to take care of us when we get old’, and she says, ‘That’s too much
pressure, I don’t want to think about all that
responsibility.’”
For a rural parent in China, each year of higher education costs
six to 15 months’ labour, and it is hard for children from poor
families to get scholarships or other government financial support.
The reason is that few children from poor families earn top marks
on the national exams, so they are shunted to lower-quality schools
that receive the smallest government subsidies. This means their
parents have to pay much higher tuition fees than affluent and
urban families.
The result is that higher education is rapidly losing its role
as a social leveller in China and as a safety valve for talented
but poor youths to escape poverty.
“The people who receive higher education tend to be relatively
better off,” said Mr Wang Jiping, the Director-General of the
Central Institute for Vocational and Technical Education in
China.
Mr Wu, 43, grew up in a poor village in Shaanxi and never
attended school. His wife, 39, dropped out in third grade. They had
decided to leave their ancestral villages to find better-paying
work to support their daughter.
For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty
18-square-metre house with a thatch roof in Hanjing, a coal-mining
community on the plains of northern Shaanxi province.
They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral
village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and
gifts, and for Mr Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines.
Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement
savings. Their daughter is their only hope.
“I’ve only got one, so I have to make sure that one takes care
of me when we get old,” said Mrs Wu.
“My head is killing me with thinking, ‘What if she can’t get a
job after we have spent so much on education?’”
The New York Times
