China's national college admissions exams are a massive headache

▶ ▶ Experts want to fix the gaokao, which benefits urban youth more than rural students ▶ ▶ “The current system itself is unfair. Inequality is inevitable”

Hu Huifeng, an 18-year- old high school senior from China’s Jiangxi province, is on a strict regimen. Seven days a week she rises by 6 a.m. for a day of classes in Chinese, English, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology, with the last one finishing at 9:50 p.m. “Once I get home, I study until midnight,” she says.

Hu is among the 9 million students preparing for the biggest test of their life: China’s annual college entrance examination. Called the gaokao, or “high exam,” it will take place over nine hours on June 7-8 across China. It’s the culmination of years of memorization and test taking, capped off by at least 12 months of grueling preparation. With its roots in the imperial examinations that started more than 2,000 years ago, the gaokao decides what school you go to and what career you might have, says Xiong Bingqi, vice president at the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Shanghai.

The gaokao is an especially high hurdle for China’s more than 100 million rural students, who already receive an education of far lower quality than their urban counterparts. A quota system for allocating coveted college slots by province, which greatly favors local students, also works against rural youth who often live far from the better universities and need higher test scores than local applicants to gain admission. That means urban youth are 7 times as likely to get into a college as poor rural youth and 11 times as likely to get into an elite institution, according to economist Scott Rozelle, a Chinese education researcher at Stanford. “The current

Students in Hengshui, Hebei province, rallied in late February to get ready for the gaokao 9m Students prepare for the annual college entrance exam

system itself is unfair,” Xiong says. “Inequality is inevitable.”

The problem stems from household registration ( hukou), which ties all social benefits, including education, to one’s hometown or village. The hukou forces most rural students, many of them children of migrant workers, to take the gaokao where their parents hail from, even if they’ve never lived there.

Hu’s father managed to keep her in school until sixth grade in Huizhou, Guangdong, where he was once a migrant worker and now runs a lighting factory. At the age of 12, Hu, like her brother before her, returned to her parents’ rural hometown more than 600 kilometers (373 miles) away to live with her grandparents in Jiangxi and go to high school. “We would have chosen for our children to be here if it was possible,” her father says.

Poor provinces spend far less on their schools than do wealthier coastal cities. (About one-third of rural students attend large boarding schools of questionable academic quality.) In Shanghai, the average amount spent per elementary school student in 2014 was 14,518 yuan ($2,200), while lesswell-off Guizhou province spent only 3,237 yuan. On average, rural students score 40 points lower on the gaokao, 21st Century’s Xiong says.

The gaokao’s all-important role in admissions is being reduced by giving universities more freedom to choose students based on class grades and teacher recommendations. The authorities are ordering public schools in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta and other regions to take in more migrant children and let them take the college entrance exams where their parents work. And the quota system is being tweaked to allow more students from the poorer central and western regions to go to better universities in the east.

The costs of migrant children entering new schools will burden local governments. And families in cities who have benefited from the unequal system are resisting change. When officials recently announced plans to allow 78,000 students from poor regions to enter colleges in the better- off provinces of Jiangsu and Hubei, protests flared. “Governor, come out!” chanted angry parents outside government offices in mid-may in Nanjing, Jiangsu. They worried that new students would harm their children’s university prospects, Chinese media reported. Local education officials later reassured parents that the numbers of local students getting into Jiangsu universities would not fall.

Some young Chinese feel the inequities keenly. “Students in Beijing can get into Peking University with lower scores than us in Jiangxi, but there’s nothing we can do,” frets Hu, who still aims for a top school. “Unfortunately, for many other ordinary students like myself, gaokao is the sole path to realize our dreams,” wrote Chengdu student Liu Yangxiu on Wechat. She was too busy studying to speak over the phone. �Dexter Roberts and Jasmine Zhao

The bottom line The role of the gaokao is slowly changing as colleges start to consider other criteria for admission beyond the test.

from the state’s utility regulator that would help them avoid closing a handful of unprofitable coal and nuclear plants. The rates were put on hold in April by federal regulators; both companies are now seeking alternatives. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a clean energy standard that would have utilities buy credits from nuclear plants as part of a goal of getting half the state’s electricity from emissions-free sources by 2030. New York regulators are reviewing the standard.

Exelon had looked for support for a similar plan in Illinois, where falling industrial activity has driven down electricity demand four years in a row. Making matters worse, out-of-state utilities are selling cheaper power into southern Illinois, undercutting coal and nuclear plants there. Because those utilities are regulated and thus guaranteed to make a profit in their home states, they can afford to sell discounted power to deregulated markets out of state. “The power price you are getting now is so much lower than it used to be,” says Kit Konolige, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. After it was undercut again in the most recent power auction in the Midwest, where power companies bid to supply electricity to interested markets, Dynegy said it plans to shut three coal units in southern Illinois over the next year. On May 6, Exelon said it will close two of its nuclear plants in the state, Clinton in 2017 and Quad Cities in 2018. The plants have lost a total of $800 million since 2008.

Amid an ugly budget battle, Illinois lawmakers were never that excited about helping either power company manage their unprofitable plants. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan called the Exelon proposal “outrageous“and said it would “force consumers to pay more only to boost the companies’ profits.” Exelon, the largest nuclear reactor operator in the U.S., earned more than $2 billion last year. It issued a statement calling Madigan’s comment “wrong-headed” considering Illinois subsidizes other sources of power such as wind and biomass generated by profitable companies.

With more wind power poised to come online and natural gas forecast to stay cheap, the outlook isn’t likely to improve for many nuclear and coal plants in the Midwest. “The energy market is depressed in the region,” says Shahriar Pourreza, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities. “That’s the long and short of it.” �Mark Chediak

On the Midwest grid, in megawatts The bottom line Coal and nuclear plants, which make up 10 percent of Illinois’s power capacity, are shutting down rather than continuing to lose money.