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.