Very common here in India too. At least when I was studying it was all about, "Get your kid to do Engineering/Medicine and then every thing will take care of itself".<p>There is a big reason for this. Uneducated people get played for easily and there is that huge disadvantage in non-knowledge driven based jobs. Take for example the job of a cab/bus driver. Or some body like mason, the problem the money you earn is directly related to number or hours/quantity of work you get delivered. And since quantity is largely related to a physical activity in this case. It means you will do a lot of physical labor to earn more money. This is not scalable and becomes blatantly clear to a lot of people involved in this. Add to this that these kinds of jobs don't get much social respect.<p>My dad was a bus driver. And I know what it was for me as a kid. It was always to study my ass off or be doomed. And yes all other standard social problems apply. You are always considered poor and assumed to remain such till eternity. No one likes knowing that he being a educated white collar knowledge worker, his kids and the kids of a bus driver ultimately get the same destiny. I even had problems getting married. Coming from a low financial background creates big problems. People find it hard to accept if you win, and pass sympathies if you don't.<p>So the only way remains: Study and fight your way out of the situation.<p>My teenage through early 20's was the most stressful phase of my life. Because failure was not an option. No money to do business, So if I fail it will going back to same life.<p>I'm not saying life is rosy as a programmer. It has its own problems both financial and in other aspects of life. But yet its far better than what I saw in early parts of my life(Nothing I will tell you, can explain you what it feels to be in that place- I only hope no other kid goes through that). I don't feel sad that I can't buy an iPhone. But rather its satisfying to know I don't have break my back just to eat, wear clothes and live under a roof.<p>Its still same here in India for a large number of people. Education and a white collar job doesn't fix all problems. But it does fix enough problems in your life to make it livable.
"Youths from poor and rural families consistently end up paying much higher tuition in China than children from affluent and urban families. Yet they attend considerably worse institutions, education finance specialists say...The reason is that few children from poor families earn top marks on the national exams. So they are shunted to lower-quality schools that receive the smallest government subsidies. The result is that higher education is rapidly losing its role as a social leveler in China and as a safety valve for talented but poor youths to escape poverty."<p>So that's certainly true in America, and perhaps even more so in China. I think platforms like Coursera/Udacity can start leveling the playing field again for two reasons: first, if the technology is good enough (from personal experience, I would say so) and remains free, the studying-resources gap between rich and poor shrinks; second, even if you can't squeeze your way into a top school, you can still get a top-notch education for free. At the end of the day, i'm grossly oversimplifying things (i.e. the weight of credentials in Chinese society probably still far outweight actual demonstrated skill-set; or consider for a moment whether a family that lives on rice and a few vegetables a day can realistically afford a computer+internet-connection for their kids...), but i still think there's a sizable impact in here somewhere.
Here in rural China (on and off ~11 years), honestly the most educated and worldly person I spoke to in the last week or so was an exotic dancer from another province who had picked up some foreign language and was evidently far more intelligent and motivated than the majority of downtrodden graduates. She said she didn't finish high school. I thought to myself: "that's probably causation not just correlation".
I can confirm this from my experience in China (~9 years), but would be a little more positive on the outcome for the graduates. It is still relatively easy to find a job and turn-over is high. In the companies where I have worked, in the university I have attended, I have seen some of these employees coming from very poor families: most are hard-working and clever, and usually can make their way into the higher strates of society (up to a level).
I would be interested to see some analysis as far as what these students are studying, not just in this article, but in all articles that attempt to account for career placement of college students in any way. Studying electrical engineering will provide a completely different likelihood of graduate employment than will studying humanities.<p>In this particular article these statistics I assume, would move the needle. I hope it's not considered "racist" of me to say so, but from my experience living in China and cross-studying in the humanities and computer science, Chinese students tend to study the hard sciences (engineering, science, accounting), whereas I never even saw a Chinese student in any of my humanities classes.
When I click this link to read, the page turns out to be not avaliable…… I should get access to it by ssh, I suddenly remind that I am just a junior studying in China.
What will happen when countries will start producing tons of graduates but not enough white collar jobs? I fear it will create very unhealthy dynamics in the society.
They describe a sub-project examining the DNA of people with IQ > 160? On the basis of 'one fact can slay a theory', I would suggest that the example of Richard Feynman (IQ at 124) indicates that this study may garner a rather small return on investment. Of course it depends on exactly what they are looking for.
Really recommend watching The Last Train Home. It's a documentary about a family that works in Guangzhou in order to pay for their children's education in their rural village. Deals with many of these same issues. And is a haunting and fantastic documentary.
Also it's available on netflix
Right now, after the sanctions, in Iran a software engineer earns 500$ a month (It is a good salary right now in Iran). So seems china is not bad at all comparing to Iran.