Why PKU's school recommendation approach not a good idea
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Fairness and equality are highly stressed among many world-famous academic institutions. Famous universities in Europe and the US give additional marks on admissions tests to students who come from poor families or from families that may lack educational resources. This helps to level the playing field and guarantee them an equal opportunity to receive higher education. If the high school principal recommendation policy of Peking University is carried out, it will further China's education gap. Students who come from rich families and attend well-known high schools will have easier access to an excellent education, while students who come from poor families will see it slip away. This recommendation policy will make the unequal situation much worse.
Students who come from rural families are confronted with the risk of not being accepted to China's top universities, due to the huge gap in education resources between urban and rural areas. According to a survey by the People's Daily, the proportion of students from rural areas who study at China's key universities is less than 30 percent; at Renmin University, the proportion is less than 20 percent (data from 2008); Tsinghua University, 17.6 percent (data from 2000); and at Peking University, 16.3 percent (data from 1999). It seems that students from rural areas are likely to be denied entrance to the top universities in China, which is harmful for the harmonious development of our society.
In the 1960s, US President Johnson implemented a policy of affirmative action. It demands that society take care of minority groups and females in college enrollment, job recruitment and promotions, and government positions. Therefore, colleges in the United States can lower admissions standards to enroll minorities. Before the enforcement of affirmative action, almost all of the students at the University of California-Berkeley were white. After affirmative action, the composition of students attending the University of California-Berkeley became more diverse. By the mid-1990s, the racial composition of the university was: 39 percent Asian, 32 percent white, 14 percent Latin, 6 percent black and 1 percent Native American. Affirmative action allowed kids from various ethnic groups to have an equal opportunity to receive an excellent higher education.
Currently, there is a huge gap in education resources between urban and rural areas in China. If we don't take effective measures to solve the problem, students from rural areas will be not be admitted to top universities in the future. I suggest that a Chinese version of affirmative action be made as soon as possible. China's affirmative action should specify that the proportion of students from rural areas must not be lower than the proportion of China's rural population, in order to guarantee that students from rural areas can continue their education at the top universities. It is urgent for the government to establish a law to regulate college enrollment. A form of affirmative action to fit China's situation is not only beneficial for students from rural areas, but also beneficial for the development of our society in the long term.
The UK government hopes that the opportunity of higher education is equal to every citizen. Therefore, it requires elite academic institutions to enroll students from poor families. In 2006, the prestigious Oxford University reformed its enrollment mechanism in order to let more students from poor families and public schools study at Oxford.
Peking University does not belong to itself, it belongs to all Chinese people…including 900 million farmers.
(The author is a professor at China Renmin University. This post was first published in Chinese on November 17, 2009 and translated by Gong Jie.)
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