The narrowing definition of success in China
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 12:03AM 
Newsweek blurb noting how China's top schools increasingly draw overwhelmingly from the urban elite.
Insider estimates on Tsinghua and Peking U (the MIT and Harvard of China's universities, respectively) say that only about 1% of the students hail from rural areas, which is amazing considering that close to half of the population live there. That kind of set-up means somebody like me (hailing from Boscobel, population 2,200 and decidedly rural) never gets into a Harvard (where some local snobs asked me, upon my arrival, how long I'd been in the country).
This doesn't mean rural kids don't get into universities, just that they're overwhelming restricted to the lesser schools. In the past, standardized tests meant a certain portion of rural kids got into top universities, but today a lot of other attributes are considered--like foreign language skills, which favor the urban elites.
Bottom line: the party elite will increasingly grow out of touch with the common man if this educational trend continues.
Reader Comments (2)
BTW, your family has been in North America since about the 1660s, so they pre-date nay "country"
Much closer to home, the US Ivy League colleges, by virtue of their political exclusion of ROTC, have divorced themselves from a major part of the US 'body politic." Education can be an enabler, but I suspect an analysis of Britain particularly before WWII would indicate that education (particularly the British 'Public Schools') can also breed isolation. The big problem here is the failure of the whole "diversity" thing; insular schools populated by smart people with narrow outlooks and life experiences produce elites that can't relate and end up preaching to the "masses". Now the "masses" ain't that dumb, and they will respond negatively to this, mostly by tuning out but occasionally by taking more active measures. I believe this was part of John Kerry's problem; he came across to my family in Western PA as "yet another insulated New Englander with money and a Harvard/Yale (Yale, in his case) education, telling us how we have to live, spend our money, etc." OK, that went into US politics, but I think it's instructive to look at how these things have played out in the US.