Urban-rural gap in higher education narrows in China

As one of China's National Education Science tenth Five-year Plan working groups, the working group "Research into Equity Issues in Chinese Higher Education" announced on February 15 that the education gap between China's rural and urban populations has been improving in recent years with an obvious increase of feminine students receiving high education, and senior high school education has become an equitable bottleneck.

The education gap between China's rural and urban populations has been the most important and outstanding one in higher education opportunities. The research shows that among the recruits of new students by the state-run key higher institutions including Tsinghua University, Peking University and Beijing Normal University the proportion of rural residents has been on decline since 1990s.

At the same time the proportion of rural population accounted for 63.3 per cent of the total students at school in 2003, or 7.9 percentage points higher over 2001 according to a survey made by the working group in colleges involving Tangshan College, North China Coal Medical College and Hebei Polytechnic College. This shows that the newly increased students from rural areas were mainly in local universities and colleges in recent years. From 1997 to 2001 the growth rate of the number of candidates applying for university entrance in urban areas surpassed that of candidates from rural areas. In 2001, the number of candidates from urban areas surpassed that from rural areas for the first time in history. This shows that urban students mainly shared the expanded enrollment quotas.

Since then the conditions had been improved. The number of candidates from urban areas increased by 1.29 times in 2004 while that from rural areas also increased by 1.29 times, reaching the equal increase margin for both urban and rural areas when compared with that of 1998.

The research shows that there is an obvious increase of feminine students receiving high education. From 1998 to 2002 the number of girl students in the higher universities and colleges in China was doubled and the proportion of girl students increased to 43.95 per cent of the total students in school from 38.31 per cent, or an increase of one percentage point on average annually. At the same time, the proportions of girl students in different degrees also increased with the fastest growth rate for women doctors. There was an increase of nearly 10 percentage points for women doctors during the four years. The number of women candidates applying for university enrollment was more than that of male candidates in areas involving Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Xinjiang. As a result, more opportunities were offered to them for receiving higher education.

Equity issue in Chinese higher education is relied on senior middle school education to a great extent and is the continuation to equity issue in elementary education. Senior middle school education has become the most direct and important factor exerting impact on the higher education opportunities. The survey shows that the proportion of students entering schools of higher education increased by 37.4 percentage points from 1998 to 2002, reaching 83.5 per cent while the entrance rate for senior high school only increased by 7.6 percentage points, reaching 58.3 per cent in 2002. This shows that the development of senior middle school education lagged behind that of higher education, becoming a new bottleneck for equitable education.

Equitable education and equal opportunity

In a certain sense equitable education means equal opportunity for education or the proportion of students in all crowds receiving school education in total students should be equal to the proportion of the same age population for all crowds. That is the conception of ¡°equal opportunity for education¡¯¡¯ and also a measuring index for ¡°equal opportunity for education¡¯¡¯.

Since 1999 China has enlarged enrollment in Chinese higher education in a large scale with an obvious increase of higher education opportunities. In 2004 the gross proportion of students entering schools of higher education surpassed 19 per cent and the scale of Chinese higher education is second to none in the world.

According to the equity index in Chinese higher education calculated in line with the 2004 data the top 10 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions with better conditions of equity in the higher education are ranked in order as follows: Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanghai, Liaoning, Jiangsu, Hebei, Zhejiang, Beijing, Shanxi and Xinjiang.

By People's Daily Online