A student sues his own father for being unable to provide tuition fees. Another father with sky-high medical bills kills himself so that his son can go to college. Most recently, a father has refused to pay his daughter's tuition fees because he thinks that a degree in modern China is worthless. Events took are more worrying turn this week when an explosion outside a school in Guilin that killed two was a reportedly a suicide bomb detonated by a parent whose child had his application turned down.
The Chinese education system in it's current state is woefully inadequate. Parents put their children under enormous pressure to do well at school, spending money on private tutors, coaching sons and daughter with mock exams and spending a small fortune relocating closer to the school when exam time roll around. The reasons that parents are so obsessed with getting their child through the best schools and university is a mixture of social and economic pressures.
The one child policy certainly heaps on the pressures for the child. With little in the way of social security, parents rely on their children to support them in their dotage. Previously, the financial burden was shared among three or four children, is now the responsibility of a solitary son or daughter. The parents themselves more than likely had their own education cut short during the late sixties during The Cultural Revolution when schools and universities closed so that the masses could dedicate themselves to studying Mao Zedong Thought.
Routinely told that the only way out of poverty is through education, the industry is a cash cow for those who can scrape together the tuition fees. Those who don't score enough on their gaokao to be rewarded with a place at a state subsidized university have to take their chances with the many fly-by-night schools that have been set up by dodgy operators who sell worthless qualifications to the uneducated rural population.
"The simpler they are, the more likely they would be fooled by us. The clever ones don't fall for it so easily," he said.
"We are a private enterprise and not really a college. Strictly speaking, it is a company. We attract the students and get their fees and send them on their way. We don't teach them anything and the college doesn't really care.
"The pressure on these kids is huge. Families would sell their cows and pigs, even their houses. That's the price of education. The city kids won't fall for this. They are more informed and know what's going on.
"Some of the rural kids don't even know what a computer looks like. You think they could learn software programming and desktop publishing? The teachers aren't interested and the college doesn't care about them."
Filmmaker Weijun Chen also followed the fortunes of a recent graduate, Wan Chao as he tries to make it in the big city. Freshly graduated, he trawls the job fairs in Wuhan, taking a number of menial offices positions. In one job interview, he says that his ambition in life is just to survive in the city. Wan is one of the 7 million graduates that enter the job market every year, with only 35% managing to find a job in their final year of study. The postgraduates do even worse, with only 26% signing a contract before they graduate.
Complicating matters further is the messy hukou system that prevents many economic migrants to first tier cities from access to social benefits that their Beijing or Shanghai born compatriots enjoy. With many graduate pinning their hopes on securing a job with a state owned company, discrimination by the SEO's favours the Han Chinese more than any other ethnic group.
The problem of finding graduates a job has attracted the attention of Xi Jin Ping, without jobs and without enough income to provide for the families, there's a strong possibility of more "social instability". At a job fair in Tianjin in May, he chatted with a number of students, helpfully shifting blame from the central government by reminding everyone that unemployment was a global problem, and that only economic development could provide graduates with the jobs they demand.
Attempts at reform have been made and shelved, guidelines are issued and then never followed. The education system, and those that profit from it are understandably reluctant to instigate any real change for the time being. When plans were announced in August that the amount of homework pupils would have to do would be officially restricted to allow students develop more practical skills, howls of derision collected on Weibo. People reflected that they heard the same thing when they were at school, and there were calls from celebrities for the education ministry to stop micromanaging education, and let the teachers decide what was best for their students.
Corruption, like most industries in China, is rife - to the extent that officials in Shanghai warned high school teachers that they shouldn't even accept gifts from parents on Teacher's Day. Even to get a place in an elementary school needs a couple of backhanders here and there, as a piece in the New York Times illustrated last year
Zhao Hua, a migrant from Hebei Province who owns a small electronics business here, said she was forced to deposit $4,800 into a bank account to enroll her daughter in a Beijing elementary school. At the bank, she said, she was stunned to encounter officials from the district education committee armed with a list of students and how much each family had to pay. Later, school officials made her sign a document saying the fee was a voluntary “donation.”
For one reason or another, the poor end up getting the roughest deal, let down by a system purportedly set up to level the playing field for every student. As more and more parents shun the Chines system, preferring to have their children take SATs to send their kids overseas, there's growing disillusionment with what the education system can provide the next generation. Top graduates at Peking University are going one better and pulling their children out of state high school, opting to homeschool instead. Once the flagship of Communist meritocracy, education in China today has little to show for itself, except an impressive list of statistics. The education system as it stands teaches children little, except to put their faith in bribery and graft.
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