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As China tries to graduate from the world's factory to a nation with a strong middle class, its peasants still aren't ready to make the leap. According to official statistics, China's urban-rural income gap reached 3.33:1 in 2009, the widest since 1978, if not before. And as the gap increases, poor peasants are becoming marginalized in higher education, closing off one of their best opportunities for advancement2. The trend is particularly alarming in Tsinghua and Peking universities, known as China's MIT and Harvard respectively for their places atop China's academic totem pole。
The most recent statistics published by media showed that of China's top two schools, Peking University had a rural population of 16.3 percent in 1999 (down from 50 percent to 60 percent in the 1950s), while Tsinghua University had a rural population of 17.6 percent in 2000. A professor at PKU said that the number might be as low as 1 percent - a shocking statistic1 considering that more than half of China's population is rural. "We can hardly find anyone here with a rural household registration," he said。
Across China, peasants make up 56 percent of the college-age population but only 50 percent of university students, mostly concentrated in China's less prestigious4 universities. Yet the very top schools are the most skewed toward city residents. Why can't peasants make it into elite5 universities? "Every rural area in China, including the outskirts6 of Beijing, lacks the educational resources of urban areas," says Liu Hong, executive director of Peer China, a nonprofit organization that focuses on bringing educational equality to Chinese secondary schools。
Traditionally, entrance to a university depended solely7 on an applicant's score on a standardized8 test, called the Gaokao (national college entrance ex?aminations). But over the last five years or so, "China went into a different system that relied less on the Gaokao and started to allow for more monkeying with the system," says James Z. Lee, dean of humanities and social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Chinese schools are copying Western ones that consider applicants9 in a more holistic10 way as they try to nurture11 well-rounded individuals instead of ace3 test takers. Yet, Liu says, "focusing on individuals widens the gap between urban and rural, because teachers in rural areas" can't offer their students nearly as well-rounded an education as their urban counterparts can。
The problems with peasant education are manifest. Farming villages aren't great places to live, so they have a tough time attracting good teachers. What's more, as wages continue to rise, the opportunity cost for peasants to leave high school and enter the work force skyrockets. Good high schools can cost $3,000 for three years, and a high-school-age laborer12 can earn $150 a month。
China's education system, where peasants can get a rudimentary education before populating thousands of factories along its eastern coast, suited it when the country sought to be the world's sweatshop. Yet factory jobs will continue to migrate to places like India. Wages in China will continue to rise. And as long as China finds no better way to educate its rural poor, it's staring down a future with a 100 million-strong underclass。
1 statistic | |
n.统计量;adj.统计的,统计学的 | |
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2 advancement | |
n.前进,促进,提升 | |
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3 ace | |
n.A牌;发球得分;佼佼者;adj.杰出的 | |
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4 prestigious | |
adj.有威望的,有声望的,受尊敬的 | |
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5 elite | |
n.精英阶层;实力集团;adj.杰出的,卓越的 | |
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6 outskirts | |
n.郊外,郊区 | |
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7 solely | |
adv.仅仅,唯一地 | |
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8 standardized | |
adj.标准化的 | |
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9 applicants | |
申请人,求职人( applicant的名词复数 ) | |
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10 holistic | |
adj.从整体着眼的,全面的 | |
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11 nurture | |
n.养育,照顾,教育;滋养,营养品;vt.养育,给与营养物,教养,扶持 | |
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12 laborer | |
n.劳动者,劳工 | |
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