Yes, pretty much what I said. I didn’t say the curriculum varied, I said funding varied.
Though now that you mention it, curriculum DOES vary:
GMT, that has happened before, sort of, in the USA. During the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, California State police and local constables harassed and at times forced migrants from Oklahoma and the prairie states to turn around at the California state border.
What he’s referring to is the difference between academic oriented high schools for those aspiring to attend universities and vocational/tech schools which are meant to channel students whose aptitudes were deemed not sufficient for the academic high schools into specific trades/jobs. A divergence which starts at the end of middle school and is determined by one’s high school entrance exam results. Students who were placed in the vocational/tech schools tend to be viewed as “not college material” by many education officials and not supported much if they desire to take the gaokao.
A similar system exists in the ROC(Taiwan) where students whose high school entrance exam results weren’t high enough for academic oriented high schools for college aspirants were placed on various tiers of vocational/technical schools, placed into apprenticeships, or expected to enter the unskilled labor force at the end of 8-9th grade*. While the system has changed somewhat so students who weren’t admitted/opted to attend a vocational/technical schools can take the national college entrance exams, the odds aren’t in their favor as their schools emphasized vocational/technical subjects to the point most didn’t receive enough exposure to academic topics which would have been covered in the academic oriented high schools.
- Unless they came from a family wealthy enough to afford sending them to private remedial high schools like the one my mother attended. However, there's a great social stigma even among the upper/upper-middle classes to have attended such institutions and one mom still feels whenever the discussions among her siblings/cousins veer towards their K-12 years.
In the Duke study, Arcidiacono found weaker students in the school switch from hard majors to soft majors. The Wellesley study also found the same thing: some departments give easier grades than others, and a change in grading practice create changes in student behaviour-choice of subsequent courses and major, faculty evaluation, etc.
It is only a problem at the tippy top schools. Schools like Beijing or Fudan give an edge to the locals. I have seen the same practice here in North America.
The students from the provinces that got into the very top schools are outstanding.
Something no one’s mentioned yet is that students in Beijing also take a different test from the one many rural students take. The Beijing test is widely considered the easier one.
So rural students don’t just need higher scores, they need to score higher on a more difficult test than their urban counterparts.
Also, an interesting article I spotted in the NYT last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/inside-a-chinese-test-prep-factory.html
It certainly put my SAT-related stress into perspective.
I’d say holding 60% of the places is more than "an edge ". Or 90% of the places, as it’s unclear where the 30% “holistic” admits come in. (Edited to add - or actually, 93.5% of the places as that is what the government proposed that the parents are protesting against - giving kids from other provinces 6.5% of places.)
I also understand - someone correct me if I’m wrong - that the difference in career prospects between the tippy top schools and the rest is massive in China compared to the US. Which is why so many Chinese students who don’t make it to those but have financial resources come here. A student our family hosted from a nearby college was one.
I’d have thought it would be all one test, I wonder why it isn’t?
<“I’ve heard that in USA, minority + legacy + VIP (donors) + VIP (children of politicians) + recruited athletes + low SES take, approximately 60% of slots.”
It is nothing short of bizarre that you assume minorities, legacies, athletes, and low SES kids must not qualify academically.>
If all these students are qualified, they would not need special hooks to get them in. Admitted due to a Hook = less qualified than the rest of the admitted applicants.
BTW, why do you left out VIP (donors) + VIP (children of politicians) from your response?
@californiaaa is saying 93% of students in the best Chinese universities are less qualified too then, since they need “special hooks” also.
SMH.
The glass-half-full type’s answer would be that the Beijing student population studies slightly different material (for instance, some will also be preparing for US college applications), hence a different test.
My (more cynical) guess is that Beijing has a different, easier test because the people who make Chinese education policy live in Beijing, as do many Communist Party higher-ups, large numbers of government functionaries who are also reliable supporters of the Party, and the military top brass whose loyalty matters to Party leadership.
And most of those bigwigs, including the initiator of the post-Maoist economic reforms Deng Xiaoping were themselves victimized by the Maoist faction and their Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
In Deng Xiaoping’s case, his oldest son ended up being driven/flung out of a third story window at Beijing U by Red Guards while a university student and became permanently crippled as a result.
In light of that historical/factional context, there wasn’t much inclination to help factions/social groups who were formerly heavily favored/privileged during the Cultural Revolution…the rural farmers/laborers. Especially when many of the post-Mao party bigwigs were themselves persecuted or ordered around to perform manual labor by those very formerly privileged groups.
I think it’s more a case of people wanting to pull the ladder up behind them, so to speak.
Not denying that. However, a major part of the motivation for that is some strong animus from memories of persecution during the Cultural Revolution from Mao and those he favored…the rural farmers and laborers and the party faction which sided with Mao, Jiang Qing, and the Gang of Four.
As I think about it…a certain Cee Lo song with an expletive in the title would probably be an understated summation of most of the ruling party elite and their upper/upper-middle class supporters in urban areas.
I am not so keen on the subject as I used to be. It was something I looked into after seeing Shanghai outscored everybody in the PISA. So the following information is a bit dated.
Here are some of the provinces and municipalities tested and their respective ranking on the 2012 Gaokao: Tianjin (15,12), Shanghai (16, 10), Beijing (26,24), Jiangsu(21,11), Zhejiang(9,5), Jilin(22,21), Hubei(8,4), Hebei(4,3), Hainan(12,23), Sichuan(25,17), Yunnan(24,27), Ningxia(29, 29).
(There are 31 jurisdictions in total, and the ranking is based on the grades required to get into a first tier university within the province. The first number is for arts, and the second number is for STEM).
If “geographical distribution” is not practiced, Beijing and Tsinghua will be overrun by students from places like Hebei and Zhejiang. Shanghai too would not be immune. There would be riots on the streets.
Of greater concern to me is the huge gap in performance among jurisdictions. Based on the results of 2012, a Cantonese needs to score 78.53% to get in a first tier college in the arts faculty in top scoring Guangdong, while a Tibetan needs only 42.67% to do the same in Tibet. I think this is where a lot of the discontent is coming from: those minorities simply can not compete.
The Chinese leadership has a serious problem on their hands. How do you make unequals appear equal?
@Canuckguy, why should there be riots on the streets? Harvard and MIT are “overrun” by non-MA people (even though Harvard has a local favoritism policy). Do you see that as a problem?
^ I was going to ask the same thing as @PurpleTitan - why would that be? If those universities are getting the “best of the best” (as defined by the gaokao), then what’s the problem? Those students form other provinces might return to them to work after college, or they might stay in the cities, either way it seems unfair to keep them out, especially if they succeed despite the lower quality of their “K-12” (Chinese version) schools.
Interestingly, during the heyday of the Imperial Chinese Civil Service Examination system, the 3 provinces with the most examinees who succeeded in passing all 3 main levels of the examinations(locality, provincial, and national levels) consistently with high scores were Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. Seems like some of this carries over to the present day and probably accounts for set-asides for Beijing/Shanghai area residents.
@cobrat, though you may want to make aware to those who don’t know that back in those days, Shanghai was part of Jiangsu (later populated largely by merchants from Zhejiang) and Hong Kong was part of Guangdong (and both those cities were really no more than small fishing villages back then).
Why would there be “riots in the street”? One of the first lessons I learned in political science is that no group would give up an advantage they have voluntarily without a fight. When it comes to self-interest, we are tribal that way. Personally, I prefer a straight-up meritocracy, but I know few politicians anywhere would support me.
Since we are talking about Chinese education, Shanghai’s performance on the PISA is worth a mention. When the results first came out in 09, the world was in shock. But based on Gaokao scores, the city is nothing special. What gives?
I learned later that 12 jurisdictions were tested but that the data from the other jurisdictions were not published. Later still, the results for Zhejiang and the jurisdictions as a whole became available in China. For what it’s worth, the 12 jurisdictions combined scored a respectable 520, a point higher than Taiwan. Zhejiang surprisingly did not do as well as Shanghai, scoring a 563 to Shanghai’ 577.
Still later, I learned that Zhejiang did most of the testing in rural areas and not in the major centres. Some of the strong provinces were not part of the twelve tested. (To be fair, some of the laggards were not tested either). Based on the Gaokao results over the years, Shanghai only performed in the average range, lagging behind places like Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shangdong etc.
@cobrat and @Canuckguy , thank you for your knowledgable input to this thread. And cobrat, I think all you have described about the cultural legacy left behind from Maoist policies is really interesting. It not only explains how the current higher education system has become what it is, but also helps explain much about current Chinese culture in general. In some ways it isn’t so different here, or anywhere else in the world. The haves will always be trying to get ahead even more, and the have-nots will always be trying to get a foot on the ladder to have-dom.
I have nothing to add, other than I am completely fascinated with China and I can’t wait to visit again.