China education: parents decry 50-50 shot at academic degree, and they’re rolling the dice on a costly plan B overseas for the kids
- An education policy enacted six years ago means that only half of junior high students in China can go on to get academic degrees in the country, and many parents don’t like those odds
- Despite Beijing’s attempt to crack down on tutoring in recent years, many families are finding that costs of ensuring an academic leg-up for their children are rising
Over the past three years, Joey Lu endured a gruelling study regimen at her junior high school, with about three extra hours of additional cramming nearly every evening.
Hard work and splashing out on costly tutors, however, weren’t enough to gain her admission into an academic high school in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou – an essential step toward being admitted to a domestic university.
This has put her entrepreneurial parents at a crossroads: their child’s future lies in either spending more than 70,000 yuan (US$9,800) for a year of additional tutoring and retaking the high school entrance exam next year, or applying to overseas high schools.
And across China, more and more middle-class families have been facing similarly difficult and anxiety-inducing decisions for the past few years. Many can trace their frustration to a policy enacted by the Ministry of Education in 2017 that aimed to divert about half of all junior high graduates to secondary vocational schools, with the rest going to academic high schools.