In China, College Costs Bring New Degree of Hardship

Few things in her hard-bitten life have made Tang Zhenzhi as proud as the day her son got into college.

For a poor village boy to pass China’s rigorous entrance exams seemed to open up a rosy horizon of opportunity and financial security for her son, Wang Daomin, and ultimately for the members of the whole family, who could count on him to support them.

But a calamitous thing happened on the way to Wang’s diploma. Rather than help pull the family members out of poverty, his education hammered them deeper into it.

Tang and her husband are mired in debt, staggering under the weight of loans scraped together from relatives and friends to pay their son’s tuition -- a hefty expense that once would have been covered by the state. They grab every chance to earn a little extra, hunting or herding sheep to supplement the paltry income brought in by their fields. Neither father nor mother has worn a stitch of new clothing in years.

Now, with a daughter who also made it into college and their son in search of a job, their reward for raising two smart, high-achieving children is near-bankruptcy.

“Other people go play mah-jongg or sit in teahouses, but I’m out all day watching sheep,” said Tang, 46, creasing her weathered face into a rueful expression.

“We can’t rest a single day,” she said, sighing. “When my son first qualified for college, I saw it as a rare opportunity, an amazing feat. But now, I’m not sure it adds up to much.”

Such a bitter reassessment flies against the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years in China, where reverence for education as a means of self-improvement and advancement has been passed down since the time of Confucius.

Generations of peasants like Tang were raised on the belief that education offered them and their progeny a sure ticket out of the misery and want that are endemic in China’s countryside. No matter their background, children who worked hard and proved themselves in school could get a degree, land a good job and haul their families several rungs up the social ladder.

But in today’s freewheeling China, ability is no longer enough.

The Communist government, abandoning many of the egalitarian ideals that brought it to power 53 years ago, no longer pays for all the nation’s best and brightest to attend college, and university fees are skyrocketing. Higher education is therefore moving increasingly out of the reach of ordinary people -- a trend that threatens to widen the yawning divide between China’s haves and have-nots.

Many parents such as Tang now face a cruel dilemma: to keep their families afloat while denying their children the chance to better themselves, or to sink into destitution beneath mounting tuition bills.

“When things were really bad, I considered making my kids give up their studies. I thought I couldn’t take it anymore,” said another farmer, Zhang Liangxue, 48. “I ate no meat for a year after my son went off to college.”

In happier circumstances, the fact that both of Zhang’s children were able to win slots in college would have brought nothing but honor to his household.

Like Tang, Zhang lives in Hujiapeng, a rustic hamlet 100 bumpy miles outside Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in eastern China. The village sits among crisply wooded hillsides in a remote spot that received telephone service only this year. A single dirt track, at times washed out by floods, threads between simple wood and red-brick homes.

Yet in spite of its backwater conditions, Hujiapeng shines brightly on the academic landscape. Out of its 143 households, the village has managed to send more than a dozen students to college in the last four years -- an impressive record.

Hujiapeng’s Communist Party boss, an affable man in his 30s named Wang Sheng, recounts with pride the story of a local boy who studied hard, went off to America for more schooling, then returned to a job in southern China that paid almost $1,000 a month, a substantial sum by Hujiapeng’s humble reckoning. That young man is now an inspiration to the many local schoolchildren who dream of making good on behalf of themselves and their families.

But Wang’s brow furrows as he starts ticking off the families with children in college that have fallen on hard times, which is to say virtually all of them.

“Their household financial situations were pretty good before, but now they’ve become poor,” said Wang, who describes it as an inverse ratio between a youth’s educational level and the financial well-being of his or her family.

To American parents, the concept of a little belt-tightening for a child’s college education is nothing unusual.

The situation in China, however, differs in several respects.

In the U.S., students and their parents enjoy more options. If private institutions like Stanford are too expensive, less costly but still excellent public universities are available. Financial aid programs can help bridge the gap, as do student loans.

Here, young people have very little choice over where the system puts them, if they’re lucky enough even to pass China’s highly competitive entrance exams. Giving up on attending your assigned university is almost tantamount to forgoing a college education, as places in the schools are so tight. There is little leeway to scout for cheaper options, and institutional mechanisms to help families afford the fees, such as low-interest bank loans, are just getting off the ground. Student work programs do not exist, and not everyone can borrow from friends.

Moreover, most Chinese parents start at a much lower level of income and living standard than the average household in the U.S. The costs of putting a child through college therefore cut far deeper: Meals are missed, medical care gets put off, leaky roofs go unrepaired, leisure activities have to be abandoned.

Tang and her husband are lucky if the rice and rapeseed they plant and the animals they tend bring in 2,000 yuan, or $240, in an entire year. Their son graduated from a local teachers college three years ago but is having trouble finding a steady, well-paid post in today’s saturated job market. Competition for jobs is so fierce that the Education Ministry recently made employment for college graduates a top priority.

Tang’s daughter is a junior, studying for a degree in art. Her annual expenses amount to nearly 10,000 yuan, or five times the household income -- equivalent to an American family making just $30,000 a year yet shelling out $150,000 in annual education costs. Tang has begged and borrowed thousands of yuan from relatives and friends.

“With our income now, there’s no way we can repay our debts,” Tang said. “We slave away.... All we can do is ride it out.”

The Tangs’ home attests to their poverty. It was built 60 to 70 years ago out of mud brick, which traps the cold now bearing down on the region. Naked lightbulbs illuminate rooms containing the barest minimum of furniture: a small dining table, a few rickety chairs, beds piled with blankets to ward off the chill.

Starting in the 1980s, better-off families in the village moved into new red-brick homes and bought color TVs as their lives improved with the end of collective farming in China. Tang and her husband remain stuck where they are.

Fellow resident Zhang was once among the most envied men in the village. He was the first to build a two-story house, nestled against a hillside and visible a mile away.

“We built my home when my son was in middle school,” Zhang said. “I encouraged him to study hard ever since he was little. For rural kids, education is a bridge. There’s no other path out.”

Both his son and his daughter heeded his advice. Because of it, Zhang is now broke.

“In 10 years I haven’t saved a single penny. Instead, I’ve had to borrow more than 10,000 yuan,” said Zhang, his jacket tattered, his shoes ripped. Parents like Tang and Zhang are victims of reforms in China’s educational system that have forced colleges and universities to raise their fees to make up for cuts in public funding. Between 1990 and 1997, tuition at institutions of higher learning rose more than 20% every year, according to government statistics.

On average, tuition now costs between 4,200 and 6,000 yuan a year, easily equaling the per capita income in many of China’s cities.

Yet the overriding value of education is an article of faith for ordinary Chinese, who grow up reciting a famous Confucian proverb: “Only education is primary; everything else is secondary.”

Many parents will sacrifice whatever necessary to put their children through school. They are loath to give up so coveted an opportunity as a spot in college --not when only about 6% of Chinese adults boast a higher degree. (In America, the figure is 26%.) China, still impoverished and undeveloped by most standards, has only 204 universities, compared with 1,900 colleges in the U.S., which serve a population less than a quarter the size.

For all the scrimping, for all the added burden and toil, Tang would not change her decision to send both her children to college.

“I don’t regret it, though life is hard now,” she said. “As long as my children have better lives than ours, that’s what matters.”

But sacrifice has its limits, Tang told her daughter. “She’ll have to rely on herself if she wants to go to grad school.”