Essay #1
China has expanded basic education for their people by quadrupling its output for college graduates, however by doing this it has created a system that discriminates against its less wealthy and well-connected citizens, preventing social mobility at every step with bureaucratic and financial barriers. One of the main problems is that there’s a huge gap in educational opportunities between students from rural areas and from the cities. Students in rural areas are known as “left-behind children”, and their grandparents take care of them while their parents are working in faraway cities. It’s good to attend urban schools because they are equipped with with state-of-the-art facilities and well-trained teachers, whereas rural students gather in very old school buildings and struggle to take advanced subjects like English and Chemistry. I feel bad for the rural students because most of them head directly to the factories after they finish middle school. Apparently the return is larger than going to a third-rate college. The opportunity for a decent education for migrant students who follow their parents to the cities is similarly limited. The Hukou System, which is a residency status that ties access to subsidized social services to one’s hometown, denies rural children the right to enter urban public schools. Instead migrant children are sent to private schools that charge higher tuition and offer subpar education. The preconditions for admission for migrant workers seem intended less to promote educational equity than to worsen the discrimination. Parents have switched jobs, sued the government, and arranged divorces to get around onerous documentation requirements. Many urban migrants have no choice but to send their children back to their rural hometowns for mediocre schooling. Also China requires students to take the national college entrance examination in their home province, and the top tier universities allocate higher admission quotas to first-tier cit...
