Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article on China’s higher education system as seen through the eyes of one rural family.  Essentially a father and mother struggled for much of their adult lives in a village in Shaanxi Province to save the money necessary to send their daughter to college.  Working in coal mines and in the fields as laborers, they forsook many comforts for themselves in order to do whatever was necessary to insure that their daughter was accepted into a college.  The tragedy of the story is that the daughter now in a polytechnic school (similar to an American community college),  is seriously thinking about dropping out because she does not think there will be good job upon graduation.

The problem is indicative of the incredible rapidity with which the Chinese higher education system expanded over the past decade.   Many schools were built and others expanded enrollments.  However, China’s economy has grown extensively based on cheap labor and manufacturing and  has not produced enough higher-paying jobs that require college degrees.  The article mentions that as many as 50-60 percent of college graduates from some colleges are unemployed.

The article provides many excellent insights into the plight of rural families, an education testing system that favors wealthy families from large urban areas, and an economy that does not fulfill the hopes and aspirations of poor parents for their children.

Tony