The current elimination rate for middle to high school is 50%? In other words, only 50% of children will go to a regular high school and get a high school diploma, and the rest either start working after middle school or go to a technical school? How good are the vocational high schools in China? Are they like Germany where this is a path to a decent living, or is it more like trade schools elsewhere where it just means you're screwed?
What I don't understand is the idea that they'd have fewer people go to high school (and thus college) in the future, by eliminating 70% instead of 50%. Since China is moving up the value chain and becoming more developed, wouldn't you want to increase the minimum level of education, so workers are prepared for work in a more advanced labor market? Seems backwards.
Oh no. Vocational high schools are notoriously absolutely terrible in China. In the very best case scenario, you have teachers who don't give a single shit about attendance or whether or not people actually listen to class. In most cases, the entire school is basically just a scam that funnels people into highly dangerous sweat shop work, where they offer you "on the job experience", so you're basically paying them tuition to work on a production line. At the worst, it's just a recruiting ground for brothels and gangs. And there's a lot more of the worst case scenario than the best. It's why Chinese parents are so obsessed with grades--because if you end up at a vocational school, your life really will be ruined.
I believe that this is just another one of those short-sighted government policies exactly like the one-child policy, where they see a looming problem now, and no one bother to project even one generation into the future to see how things will turn out. Right now, at the very least, China's economic advantage in the world is still held up by cheap, menial labour and bodies you can fill a sweatshop with. They don't feel like they can entirely abandon the advantage, and people who have a university degree don't want to study for that long and pay all that tuition just to end up making cheap T-shirt on a production line.
This is basically a government policy designed to keep up the number of people available to sweat shops. And they're not going to realise how hard this is screwing over China on its attempt to ever move away from that economic model, until the problem becomes too big to ignore. Just like the one-child policy again.
This is honestly because (despite all the surveillance), the actual leaders of the CCP have very, very, very little idea about what China is like at all. When I was a small child, the leader of the CCP back then visited my hometown on some kind of "hold babies and smile" political campaign (I was legit one of those babies). My dad said that the local police department had gotten an itinerary down to the minute ahead of time of exactly what they're going to do when.
And then they got thousands of police to come in from all around our small town, and dress up as random passer-bys, so that every farmer Chairman Hu drove past, every other car on the road, every diner at a random restaurant they stop by. They're all undercover cops, putting on a front of an ecstatic and overwhelmingly supportive crowd. I was one of the only "real" people to ever see Chairman Hu, because they don't have undercover cop babies.
And of course, with the internet censored, things have to get really, REALLY bad before you hear anything about it.
That is terribly short-sighted, then. An educated populace is key to a developed economy — funneling people into a system that just turns them into sweatshop workers can't be good for your long-run potential. I looked around a little bit thanks to your comment and saw that the economist Scott Rozelle at Stanford has done a lot of research into exactly this problem of human capital development: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/01/21/the-biggest-obstacle-to-chinas-rise-is-struggling-rural-children
"Currently, 70% of the Chinese workforce is unskilled. Such labourers can do repetitive factory work, but as their wages rise, those jobs will move to poorer countries such as Vietnam. To escape from what economists call the “middle-income trap”, China needs rapidly to improve its people’s skills, so that they can handle more complex tasks. Yet its workers are far less educated than those in other middle-income countries, such as Mexico, Turkey and South Africa. They are also less educated than workers were in countries that recently grew rich, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when those places were no better off than China is today."
And that story about Hu Jintao's visit is amazing (not the good kind of amazing, but still). It's completely a Potemkin village but in the 21st century. Wow.
CCP has made lots of short-sighted decisions though. The one-child policy was instituted because everyone figured, "Look, like, everyone in the country wants to have eight kids. If population gets too low, we'll just lift the restrictions and we'll have a population explosion in no time." They never expected that with the proliferation of birth control (and abortion) and rising standards of living, people would stop wanting to have kids like it's happened in every developed nation in the world.
Similarly, they're just like, "Everyone's parents are absolutely obsessed with grades. Whenever we need more college students, we'll just lift the restrictions and we'll have an educated populace in no time at all." And they're never considering that by the time they realise the need for educated labour, there might not be anyone left to teach.
Some other time, I should write up a thing about how fucked Chinese education is.
It is a Potemkin Village, but like, for your own country's leaders--not to show off to a foreign nation. That's what's particularly fucked. Even in a normal nation, politicians tend to be kind of detached and sheltered from what life is like. The problem is so, so much worse in China.
Is trying to pass exams to move from middle to high school a one-shot thing where if you fail you are done, or can you keep retaking them every year if your family has the resources?
You can retake your last year of school and just try again, but because the promotions and bonuses of every staff member at your school, from the teachers to the headmaster, is dependent on average grade and graduation rate, it means that very, very few schools are going to be willing to accept someone whose grades are bad enough that they failed the first time. Unless you have a damn good reason why you failed the first time despite having good grades normally--like you came down super sick exactly when the exams took place or something--you won't be accepted anywhere.
And homeschooling isn't a thing in China. You need a school to take you on as a student if you want to participate in the exams.
You could find one of those private schools that doesn't care about average grade and just cares about money, but then you're basically paying high six-figures for an attempt, and most families aren't going to be able to afford that.
The current elimination rate for middle to high school is 50%? In other words, only 50% of children will go to a regular high school and get a high school diploma, and the rest either start working after middle school or go to a technical school? How good are the vocational high schools in China? Are they like Germany where this is a path to a decent living, or is it more like trade schools elsewhere where it just means you're screwed?
What I don't understand is the idea that they'd have fewer people go to high school (and thus college) in the future, by eliminating 70% instead of 50%. Since China is moving up the value chain and becoming more developed, wouldn't you want to increase the minimum level of education, so workers are prepared for work in a more advanced labor market? Seems backwards.
Oh no. Vocational high schools are notoriously absolutely terrible in China. In the very best case scenario, you have teachers who don't give a single shit about attendance or whether or not people actually listen to class. In most cases, the entire school is basically just a scam that funnels people into highly dangerous sweat shop work, where they offer you "on the job experience", so you're basically paying them tuition to work on a production line. At the worst, it's just a recruiting ground for brothels and gangs. And there's a lot more of the worst case scenario than the best. It's why Chinese parents are so obsessed with grades--because if you end up at a vocational school, your life really will be ruined.
I believe that this is just another one of those short-sighted government policies exactly like the one-child policy, where they see a looming problem now, and no one bother to project even one generation into the future to see how things will turn out. Right now, at the very least, China's economic advantage in the world is still held up by cheap, menial labour and bodies you can fill a sweatshop with. They don't feel like they can entirely abandon the advantage, and people who have a university degree don't want to study for that long and pay all that tuition just to end up making cheap T-shirt on a production line.
This is basically a government policy designed to keep up the number of people available to sweat shops. And they're not going to realise how hard this is screwing over China on its attempt to ever move away from that economic model, until the problem becomes too big to ignore. Just like the one-child policy again.
This is honestly because (despite all the surveillance), the actual leaders of the CCP have very, very, very little idea about what China is like at all. When I was a small child, the leader of the CCP back then visited my hometown on some kind of "hold babies and smile" political campaign (I was legit one of those babies). My dad said that the local police department had gotten an itinerary down to the minute ahead of time of exactly what they're going to do when.
And then they got thousands of police to come in from all around our small town, and dress up as random passer-bys, so that every farmer Chairman Hu drove past, every other car on the road, every diner at a random restaurant they stop by. They're all undercover cops, putting on a front of an ecstatic and overwhelmingly supportive crowd. I was one of the only "real" people to ever see Chairman Hu, because they don't have undercover cop babies.
And of course, with the internet censored, things have to get really, REALLY bad before you hear anything about it.
That is terribly short-sighted, then. An educated populace is key to a developed economy — funneling people into a system that just turns them into sweatshop workers can't be good for your long-run potential. I looked around a little bit thanks to your comment and saw that the economist Scott Rozelle at Stanford has done a lot of research into exactly this problem of human capital development: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/01/21/the-biggest-obstacle-to-chinas-rise-is-struggling-rural-children
"Currently, 70% of the Chinese workforce is unskilled. Such labourers can do repetitive factory work, but as their wages rise, those jobs will move to poorer countries such as Vietnam. To escape from what economists call the “middle-income trap”, China needs rapidly to improve its people’s skills, so that they can handle more complex tasks. Yet its workers are far less educated than those in other middle-income countries, such as Mexico, Turkey and South Africa. They are also less educated than workers were in countries that recently grew rich, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when those places were no better off than China is today."
And that story about Hu Jintao's visit is amazing (not the good kind of amazing, but still). It's completely a Potemkin village but in the 21st century. Wow.
CCP has made lots of short-sighted decisions though. The one-child policy was instituted because everyone figured, "Look, like, everyone in the country wants to have eight kids. If population gets too low, we'll just lift the restrictions and we'll have a population explosion in no time." They never expected that with the proliferation of birth control (and abortion) and rising standards of living, people would stop wanting to have kids like it's happened in every developed nation in the world.
Similarly, they're just like, "Everyone's parents are absolutely obsessed with grades. Whenever we need more college students, we'll just lift the restrictions and we'll have an educated populace in no time at all." And they're never considering that by the time they realise the need for educated labour, there might not be anyone left to teach.
Some other time, I should write up a thing about how fucked Chinese education is.
It is a Potemkin Village, but like, for your own country's leaders--not to show off to a foreign nation. That's what's particularly fucked. Even in a normal nation, politicians tend to be kind of detached and sheltered from what life is like. The problem is so, so much worse in China.
Would read anything you write about Chinese education!
Is trying to pass exams to move from middle to high school a one-shot thing where if you fail you are done, or can you keep retaking them every year if your family has the resources?
You can retake your last year of school and just try again, but because the promotions and bonuses of every staff member at your school, from the teachers to the headmaster, is dependent on average grade and graduation rate, it means that very, very few schools are going to be willing to accept someone whose grades are bad enough that they failed the first time. Unless you have a damn good reason why you failed the first time despite having good grades normally--like you came down super sick exactly when the exams took place or something--you won't be accepted anywhere.
And homeschooling isn't a thing in China. You need a school to take you on as a student if you want to participate in the exams.
You could find one of those private schools that doesn't care about average grade and just cares about money, but then you're basically paying high six-figures for an attempt, and most families aren't going to be able to afford that.