Migrating college candidates could be left out in cold
By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-08-03 05:45

Why move?

Li Yang is not alone. There are tens of thousands of students like him, trying not only to get higher grades but also increase their chances of acceptance by a particular institution. As university education has such a great influence on career prospects, young students and their parents naturally do whatever they can to beat the system.

The national college entrance exam is the same across the country in design and scoring, but varies by province in terms of the cut-off line for university admission. The more high-scoring students there are, the fewer slots are available for each successful candidate as the number of admissions is determined by the educational resources in each province.

But there is government tinkering with the system as well. Places that traditionally lack education resources are given preferential treatment as national schools lower their cut-off scores for the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region and Hainan Province, amongst others. This is similar to race-based affirmative action policies in the United States.

Metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai have relatively low cut-off scores because most of the top universities are located there.

This year's cut-off point for admission to elite schools to study the humanities is 486 points in Beijing and 572 in Shandong. It is not surprising that the few big cities have much higher candidate admission rates - about 20 per cent higher than the 2004 national average of 51 per cent.

Ace student Li is not typical - he would have won a place at a top university wherever he took the entrance exam. Most exam migrants feel their hope of admission can only be salvaged through geography.

Hard statistics are scarce, but the trend seems to be growing. In Hainan, one of the low-scoring territories, migrating students are coming in waves.

According to figures from the local education department, there were just 198 such migrants in 1999 but 9,800 this year. They now account for about 20 per cent of all pupils sitting the national college entrance exam in the province.

The migrant candidates hail from Henan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Hunan and five other high-scoring provinces, some of which are not economically advanced but churn out a disproportionately high number of overachievers in the life-changing aptitude test.

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