In China higher education is expanding at a rate unprecedented anywhere in the world. However, rocketing tuition and fees now exceed a rural family’s annual income many times over. Frequently, the best and brightest of China’s students from the countryside overcome miraculous odds academically to pass the rigorous entrance examinations to go to college, only to find their dreams shattered by the financial reality of escalating tuition. Sadly, many others hit bottlenecks along their K-12 educational journey long before; never finishing high school, never taking the college entrance exam. As a result, students from China’s poor, rural areas find themselves largely excluded from new educational opportunities and consigned to a continued life in poverty.

While it is well known that there is a crisis, perhaps what is most tragic is that little is understood about the precise scale of the problem. This, of course, means that there is almost no basis for decision making or large scale policy intervention to close the education gap in poor areas. As a basis for understanding the extent of the educational gap in rural China and the context of poverty in which rural students and their families struggle against, the Rural Education Action Project conducted a survey of high school students from 20 classes, in 10 high schools chosen randomly from 8 counties. We expect the results to illuminate, in empirical terms, what the educational realities are in rural China and indicate what the strategic intervention points may be.

Research Design
Information was collected from 10 high schools in 8 randomly selected counties. From 2 randomly selected classes in each of these schools, all students and class captains (banzhuren) were surveyed.

Results
Ongoing Project.
Initial results indicate the rate of university attendance for students from rural Shaanxi is 5% (compared to 70% commonly found for students from China’s urban areas).

Region
Shaanxi Province, Northwest China

REAP Partners
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Northwest Social-Economic Development Research Center

Funding
Stanford University, Chinese Academy of Sciences