China's poorest get sceptical about higher education When Wang Fei was admitted to university, his parents hosted the entire village for a banquet. "Not many people here went to university and in our family I'm the only one," he says. But two years after his graduation with a logistics degree from Ningbo university, his family and neighbours in Xiaozhai, a village in the hilly, landlocked province of Guizhou, one of the poorest corners of China, are in much less of a mood to celebrate 24-year-old Mr Wang because his career is not living up to expectations. "When they look at me, many people think university is useless," he says. In China, where scholarship was once seen as a path for social mobility for anyone, especially the poorest view higher education with increasing scepticism. "My brothers and my sister are as smart as I am, but there was no money, and then they preferred to get an industry job to going to university," says Jiang Guoli, a 20-year-old English student from Leidayan, another poor Guizhou village. Her entire generation has left home not to pursue more knowledge or training but for the quick money expected from jobs in the export manufacturing hubs of coastal China. The trend is the result of 15 years of higher education reforms that were intended to achieve the exact opposite. From the late 1990s, Chinese universities, once elite institutions which only a tiny fraction of high school graduates could hope to enter, were encouraged to throw their doors open and recruit more students. In 2010, 6.6m new students entered university, an all-time record. However, poor applicants from the countryside are in a much weaker position to grab these new opportunities. Village primary and high schools lack the qualified teachers and funds that urban schools have. "The people they hire for our schools are mostly senior high school graduates who work as substitute teachers," says Wu Bingfeng, a 22-year-old student of applied chemistry at Guizhou University. As a result, rural students often fall behind their urban rivals in the nationwide university entry exams and only manage to enter less lower-ranking universities. According to a Chinese government survey conducted in 2006, 3.5 times as many urban students as rural students graduated from senior high school. In technical school, the factor widens to 55.5 times, in university to 281.6 times and in post graduate studies to 323 times. The ratio of students with rural backgrounds entering top universities such as Tsinghua, renowned as "China's MIT," or Peking University, has dropped drastically since the reforms began. "The expanded student recruitment by universities has increased chances to receive an education, [...] but it has not automatically advanced the realisation of fair access to education," said Yang Jianchao, a professor at Nanjing Normal university, in a paper last year. While rural students on average have a smaller chance of obtaining a good university education, they pay as much as those from the city. When the Chinese government relaxed entry limits to the universities, it also allowed them to raise fees to finance the larger student numbers. Average annual university fees between Rmb4,000 (US$634) and Rmb6,000 seem low compared to international counterparts. But that is still four to 10 times the annual household income in some of rural China's poorest regions. Although some comfort may be drawn from the fact that rural income is growing, such disparities have widened with China's rapid urbanisation. The urban population now exceeds the rural one, as Beijing announced this week. Jiang Guoli's home village of Leidayan indicates the standard of living in such areas. Home to 40 families, it clings to a steep slope high above a river gorge and is far away from the paved road, fixed-line telephone network and the nearest primary school. It takes more than four hours by bus plus a two-hour hike to reach it from Guiyang, the provincial capital. Many families in Guizhou and Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, other provinces with rural populations at the bottom of China's wealth ladder, have been driven deep into debt by their attempts to send their offspring to university, seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape poverty. Mr Wang, the logistics graduate, is still optimistic that his university education will eventually pay off. But his situation remains a tough one. Since his graduation two years ago, he has tried and failed to raise chicken and plant vegetables and corn in his home village, worked as a waiter in a Shanghai hotel and most recently opened a computer shop in a nearby town. He has also racked up Rmb40,000 in debt on top of Rmb20,000 in student loans he has yet to pay off. Additional reporting Chen Yuanni in Guizhou