Protests force climbdown on university access quotas

At least five provinces in China have scrapped a scheme announced last month to adjust university admissions quotas to improve access for students from poorer provinces, after fears that parent protests during the sensitive national university admissions test period could spread to more provinces.

Parents of students sitting the ferociously competitive exam known as the gaokao which began last week, had protested in the streets in May and June against the expansion of admissions quotas to increase the number of students from outside the provinces. The protests, first reported in Jiangsu province, spread to Henan, Hubei and Hebei provinces by the third week of May. Northeastern Heilongjiang province also saw protests.

Some two dozen cities were affected by the angry protests, which appeared to take the authorities by surprise.

But the quota system has been shelved for the time being on orders from the central government, which had initially handed down the instruction to provinces less than a month earlier. It is unclear whether it has been merely postponed for this year or scrapped altogether.

The director of Hubei province’s education bureau, Liu Chuantie, reportedly told Chinese media that Hubei’s seven central government-supported universities would not after all change their admissions quotas as previously planned, the magazine Caixin reported last week. Other universities not financed by the central government had not been included in the proposed quota system.

Liu had earlier said the provincial bureau would ensure the number of local students admitted to universities in the province and the acceptance rate would not be lower than in 2015, amid concern by parents that the figures were simply being manipulated to quell the protests.

Director of the education department of Jiangsu province, Shen Jian, also said in a local television interview in May that there would not be any change to the number of places for students in the province for the time being.

The education ministry in Beijing had ordered officials in 12 cities and provinces “with abundant higher education resources, where [students] are facing less pressure to enter college in 2016", to guarantee university places for 160,000 students from 10 underprivileged regions, such as the southern provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan. Combined places for local students were to fall by an equal amount.

The protestors were incensed that their provinces were being asked to increase the number of places for out-of-province students, while at the same time their children do not benefit from improved access to the most prestigious places in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, which were not included in the new quota system.

This is particularly the case in Hebei province which borders on Beijing, where Hebei students are often required to have higher scores in the gaokao than Beijing residents.

Research has shown that students from poorer provinces are hugely underrepresented in the best universities in Beijing and Shanghai.

Liu said the recent uproar over quota changes pointed to the sensitivity of the debate around university access. He suggested officials try balancing the system by first expanding the total university enrolment capacity and then fine-tuning admissions quotas, with the goal of offering balanced access to local students and non-locals alike.

But Xiong Bingqi, vice-president at 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank, suggested education officials consider scrapping the quota system altogether. The latest protests were simply an expression of long-repressed anger, he said.

The current quota system is a legacy of China's fading, planned economy era, Xiong said. Promoting equal educational opportunity through a quota system is "a dead-end" approach.

Chinese universities have been using a quota admissions system for decades, said Zhao Lianghong, a former education ministry exam director, adding the system had divided the country and, in the wake of the successful parent protests, it was apparently not going away anytime soon.