He went back to his brick bed and lay down. After a while he got up, tottered to the other end of the room, took one last look at his children squeezed into one bed and sound asleep, then went back to lie beside his wife.

At midnight, Chen Yi was shaken awake by his panicked mother. He jumped out of bed to find his father vomiting.

'When I was trying to carry him, he cast a glance at me...' Chen Yi paused, as if something was caught in his throat. He continued in a low, dry voice: 'It was a look of guilt, a look I will never forget for the rest of my life.'

The only words his father managed to say were: 'I'm sorry, son, I am not a good father.'

Two hours later, Chen died in the Yushe People's Hospital, leaving behind his 39-year-old wife, his parents in their 70s and Chen Yi and his three siblings, aged between 11 and 16 and all at school.

'I am the chief criminal, the cause of the disaster. I forced my dad into suicide,' the devastated Chen Yi said.

'Had I not done well on the exam, my father would not have killed himself.'

Chen Yi said he was thinking of not going to college. 'I should take responsibility for caring for the family from now on,' he said.

Chen Yi received his score of 554 on June 25, the day his father was buried. The score surpassed the minimum Level-A university score of 552 for science students.

His mother, Li Jinlian , believed her husband was killed by poverty.

Since his family migrated from a remote village four years ago, Chen had remained such a background figure that many villagers were unaware of his real name.

He was more often referred to as 'Chen Er', for being the second-eldest in his family, known as a diligent shepherd who cared for 90 goats and greeted people with a silent smile instead of stopping for a chat.

But for the family he was the sole breadwinner, an unfailing husband and a loving father.

Educationally deprived himself, Chen insisted on sending all of his children to school, regardless of how poor the family was, according to Ms Li.

But no matter how hard the parents laboured, they never managed to make ends meet.

In the days before his death, Chen often checked their small money box hidden in a corner of the room.

'He lamented how quickly the money dwindled after my second son came back home to take a few hundred yuan for living expenses,' Ms Li said. Both her sons are at boarding school.

On the night Chen killed himself, there was only 400 yuan left. The family still owes relatives 26,000 yuan in cash and construction materials for their house.

Ms Li said they had 'lost face' and had exhausted channels for borrowing more money to pay for the eldest son's tuition.

'What father doesn't want to live and see his children grow up? Had he seen any hope, he would have not taken this way out,' she said.

With an annual gross income of about 7,000 yuan, the family spent about 20,000 yuan on the children's education, family living expenses and the costs of farming and stockbreeding.

But Chen's family is not the worst off among New Village's 650 residents.

Villagers said about half the families in the village were even poorer than Chen's, scrounging one or two thousand yuan from their farmland per year.

New Village has an average of 0.09 hectare of farmland per capita, and even this tiny allotment has dwindled in recent years due to rampant farmland requisitions.

Ministry of Agriculture statistics for last year put the average income of the 900 million farmers on the mainland at 3,255 yuan, while universities commonly charge 5,000 yuan tuition a year.

Rough calculations show that for a rural family as poor as Chen's, it takes more than 30 years to pay off the cost of four years at university for one student.

Education Ministry spokesman Wang Xuming said the tragedy need not have happened since the central government had set up a 'Green Channel' allowing poor students to enter university before paying tuition.

'I can say, with full responsibility, that every student enrolled by a public university can enter that school successfully,' Mr Wang said.

Han Min, a deputy head of the National Centre for Education Development Research, said the government had failed to disseminate information on this policy to people in real need, especially to poor families with limited access to information.

Despite the financial aid policy, experts say that disproportionately high education costs are still an insurmountable obstacle to many students.

Leading educationalist Yang Dongping said policymakers were 'overconfident' about the practical effects of paperwork. In particular, funding differences between the central and local governments meant policies often were unevenly implemented.

'Full financial aid is unrealised in the majority of local universities, in contrast to national ones, which are richly funded by the central government,' he said.

But it is precisely those poorly financed local colleges that attract most poor students, due to their relatively cheap living expenses and the lack of competition from their urban counterparts.

For example, 53 per cent of the students at Qinghai University in northwestern China are from the countryside, while only 15 per cent of students at key universities in the capital come from rural backgrounds.

All three universities Chen Yi applied to are in Xian .

His father once asked why, as the top student in his class, he didn't go to Beijing.

'If you were a millionaire, I would go,' the then-happy Chen Yi had jokingly replied.