06/08/26 - Gaokao Edition!
”Gaokao numbers drop again! The chain reaction is here.
Gaokao, postgrad programs, and the civil servant exam are all coming to a turning point.
In 2026, 12.9 million people around the country signed up for the Gaokao, 450,000 less people than last year, the second year in a row the number has decreased.
At the same time, this is the third year that the number of applicants to postgrad degrees has decreased. The total decrease is 1.31 million people, nearly 1/3rd less from its peak.
But the number of people taking the civil servant exam has just reached a new high, not only doubling its numbers from five years ago, but exceeding the number of people getting into postgrad degrees for the first time last year.
A single turning point appearing might be a coincidence, but when so many add up, what does it mean?
It’s not surprising that less people want to get into postgrad and more people want to take the civil servant exam, but most people didn’t expect the number of Gaokao students to decrease. After all, the number of high school students has yet to reach its peak.
According to official statistics, the population peak has just reached middle school this year. They’ll only get to high school in 2029, and college in 2032.
Birth rate has a delayed effect on education. There’s a staged process here. If the number of high school students hasn’t reached its peak, why has the number of Gaokao students?
If people are taking the Gaokao at 18-years-old, then the people taking it this year were “Olympic babies”. Back then, the number of births per year was around 16 million, higher than the two years before.
Not to mention, after 2011, the Two Child Policy was quickly proliferated and the birth numbers began climbing, reaching a peak of 18 million in 2016.
This means that the turning point for Gaokao students shouldn’t have happened until around 2034.
So why is it already flagging so much in the last two years?
The reason is that it’s not just 12th graders who are signing up for the Gaokao, but repeat students too. It doesn’t just cover the Gaokao that’s happening right now, but the spring Gaokao too.
According to analysis by education experts, the receding wave of repeat students is one of the factors.
Most public schools no longer accept repeat students. The new Gaokao’s questions are designed to not reward repeated test taking, which increases the risk of repeating a year, and the cost and time waste associated with repeating a year isn’t seeing quite the same expected returns.
Tech schools is another factor. Although if you transfer from junior tech school (equivalent of high school) into proper tech school (equivalent of uni), you count as taking the Gaokao too, a lot of people just go straight from junior tech school to work and ignore the Gaokao.
Not to mention, AI is changing the labour market, impacting white collar jobs first of all. The job protection that a college degree provides you is getting smaller and smaller.
The cost of repeating a year, employment rates for junior tech grads, AI replacement theory all means that the value of a diploma is changing rapidly.
When diplomas were still highly valued, there are people still repeating years ten years in. But when diploma is facing severe inflation, the earlier you enter the job market, the better off you are.
This is the reason less and less people are taking the Gaokao or postgrad exam.
There’s more and more uni students and it’s easier and easier to get into uni.
Last year, 13.35 million people signed up for the Gaokao, and around 10 million people were admitted. The admittance rate has exceeded 80% for multiple years now.
That means so long as you sign up, 8 out of 10 people will get to go to college, and 3-4 people will make it into a proper university.
In comparison, back in the 90s, only a couple hundred thousand people were accepted nationwide, with universities only accepting a little over 100,000 people.
At the time, there were more than 20 million people in the eligible age group. Out of 100 people, only 1 would get to go to university. That’s where the saying, “Like an army crossing a single-plank bridge,” comes from.
Now, even accounting for all the people of the right age, the admittance rate for higher education is still more than 60%, double what it was in 2012.
Generally speaking, admittance rates below 15% is elite education, 15-50% is normal public education, and over 50% is near universal education.
The proliferation of higher education has meant that everyone is a college student, and masters and doctorates aren’t rare either. This is a victory in higher education and is necessary to becoming a stronger country through education.
But there’s two sides to everything, and a new problem as arrived:
As diplomas inflate, college students are nearly as valuable as they used to be.
To put it bluntly, if you throw a brick blindly in the air, it’ll likely land on a college student.
Department of Education statistics show that last year, there were 39.54 people taking Bachelor’s Degrees, 4.3 million people taking Master’s Degrees, a total of more than 43.8 million people.
There are more than 8 cities in China which has more than a million college students, the highest being Guangzhou at 1.78 million, double what it was in 2010.
And that’s just current college students. Considering that colleges have been expanding admissions for 30 years now, we’re seeing hyperinflation in college students around the country.
The latest 2025 “little census” statistics show that more than 270 million people in China have a Bachelor’s Degree, 100 million more than 10 years ago.
Clearly, a college student is no longer a Chosen One. A diploma is just proof of basic education, and can’t guarantee any sort of employment.
But even as many college students as there are, the distribution of top universities between different regions is still uneven. Good universities are still a rare resource, and a 985 graduate is still impressive.
After last year, when Qinghua and Beijing University expanded admissions by 150-200 students, this year, other 985 universities like Nanjing University and Zhongshan University are all expanding admissions. Southeastern University is even expanding admissions by 600 people.
This is just the beginning. According to the government’s plans for the 15th 5-year-plan, top universities in China should expand their admissions by more than 100,000.
Right now, China has 147 top universities. This means that over the next five years, on average, every one of them has to expand admissions by 700.
Unlike the expanded admissions for tech schools earlier, this round of expansions includes even 985 and 211 universities.
This means that once we’ve solved the difficult problem of “getting into uni”, policy is now focused on getting more people into a “good uni”.
It’s also worth mentioning that this round of expanded admissions isn’t general. It’s focused on artificial intelligence, embodied AI, renewable energy storage, integrated circuitry, and other new STEM fields.
This is the same direction as China’s general college major shift. The Department of Education recently published 38 new Bachelor’s majors, all of which are in the realm of “new STEM”.
At the same time, over the last 5 years, over 5000 different majors have been cancelled around the country, mostly in the humanities, concentrated around e-commerce, foreign language, marketing, international economics and trade, industrial design, tourism management, arts, and filmography.
These majors are no longer suited to the developments of the times, with low employment prospects, and are hit the hardest by AI.
And this is just the beginning.
Changing demographics, education, AI, and employment means that the path of “good university -> good job -> good life” no longer works.
Getting used to new trends, picking a good cities, finding a good major, and getting into a good university is more and more important.”
Comments say, “What are you so worried about? We’ve still got talent coming in from India to replace us.”
“Goddammit. When I was trying to get into postgrad, so was everyone else. And now that I’m trying to get into government, it’s right when everyone else wants to too!”
“Big increase in students in Beijing though. Everyone wants to take the exam in Beijing.”
“Just looked at this year’s Gaokao math exam. I honestly think there’s no point in pressuring your kids anymore. The reason is very realistics: they’ve completely changed the way they test maths.
The era where you can get high grades by repeatedly doing past exams and understanding all the tropes is already gone. This year’s exam, especially the new Gaokao I exam (Guangdong, Jiangsu, and 11 other provinces) is clearly promoting “think more, calculate less”. It deliberately sabotages the rhythm that students build up by repeatedly working the same questions. The routines you get into through brute force memorisation is useless. It’s testing how much you understand the question and how creative your thought process is.
To put it bluntly, they don’t just care whether you can or not, but how smart you are. The standards for selecting talent through the Gaokao is becoming clearer: they want people with a mathematical mindset, a “talented” candidate or at least one full of potential who can solve new problems. This is because our society needs people who can innovate and break through norms in fields like chips, AI, and aerospace, not executors who blindly apply formulas.
For the hardworking midwit, this is particularly difficult. The middle questions in the exam are often filled with traps and are a huge time sink. If you’re stuck right in between, “only memorised the formula” and “actually understands the theory”, the exam will show right away whether or not you know how to apply your knowledge.
I gotta admit, mathematical thinking really does come down to talent. You either have it or not. It’s hard to instill through repetition. Understanding your child’s strengths and weaknesses is better than blindly putting more pressure on them. If your kid is really not good at this sort of abstract thinking, maybe you should helping him grow in a field he actually has passion for and is good at. That’s the more rational and more humane choice.
Do you think it’s more scientific to adjust Gaokao maths this way, or is it harder for some kids?”
Comments say, “What does an exam have to do with chips?”
“It’s the same every year, and every year’s exam is different. You gotta work on yourself.”
“That’s what you say every year.”
“If most people are getting the message that normal people shouldn’t waste time studying maths because they don’t have the talent, then this was a bad exam.”