For those who went through the American education system, China’s National College Entrance Exam or gaokao may seem like a simple Chinese equivalent of the SAT. But the gaokao is vastly more important than any standardized test in the United States. College admissions in the United States are holistically determined, involving a consideration of a wide range of variables of which standardized tests are only one. For the vast majority of students in China, gaokao performance is the main factor determining whether they will be admitted to university. This grueling test helps decide the fate of millions every year.
In The Highest Exam, Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li show how the gaokao’s influence goes far beyond the education system. Jia and Li, who themselves took the gaokao, define the exam as the final showdown in a “centralized hierarchical tournament.” Every year, the gaokao is taken by over ten million high school students and repeat candidates. The student’s score doesn’t really matter; what does matter is their position relative to other students within their own province. The logic of the system is inherently zero-sum. One’s success is predicated on the failure of others.
The stakes of this zero-sum tournament are extraordinarily high. In the United States, the importance of one’s undergraduate degree begins to fade into the background as one accumulates work experience or acquires a postgraduate degree. In China, a gaokao-determined undergraduate education will follow you for life. Doors leading to the best careers are permanently slammed shut if your gaokao score is too low. As Jia and Li point out, “attending an elite college affects your economic bracket for the rest of your life.”
An Education Affordability Crisis
The high stakes and extreme competition of the gaokao means there’s enormous pressure on parents to invest in the educational arms race. While Americans often lament the exorbitant cost of higher education, The Highest Exam shows that Chinese households also face massive education costs, just at different points in the system. China’s elementary and middle schools are free, but generally high school is not. Students and their families have to pay for tuition, uniforms, and sometimes room and board, which makes up the bulk of education expenses. In addition, expensive tutoring is a de facto necessity for urban students.
Entry into the best elementary schools is determined by school district residency, although it is not unknown for wealthy parents to pay a large one-off fee or leverage special connections get their kids into the best schools, even though China’s ministry of education has repeatedly ordered localities to eliminate fees associated with admission. Buying an apartment to meet residency requirements is ludicrously expensive, with home prices in Beijing’s best school districts higher than even Palo Alto. In one section of the Highest Exam, Ruixue and Li report instances of parents paying entrance fees reaching as high as $75,000, over fourteen times the annual median disposable income in China. Only parents at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid have the connections to get their kids into these schools. Even with these incredible barriers to elementary school admissions, there are still more applicants than there are spots, meaning students have to take an elementary school entrance exam. To prepare for the exam, parents start their children on the tutoring grind as early as age four.
These accumulating costs mean that families spend massive sums on putting their kids through school. Households with students spend an average of 17 percent of their household earnings on education. This financial burden falls much harder on lower-income families desperate to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Despite spending far less in absolute terms on education than rich families, households in the bottom quartile, who “only” average $1,280 a year, spend 57 percent of their household earnings on education. Even if the gaokao itself is the same for all students, the resources that families can bring to bear are not. The intense pressure of China’s education system and its early starting line have created a student mental health crisis impacting students as young as seven.
The K-Shaped Labor Market
Seen from another perspective, the existence of the gaokao within a nominally communist country is quite ironic. It replicates capitalism’s zero-sum competition between workers for jobs within the education system. Securing a spot in one of China’s best colleges means kicking other students down the ranking ladder. This means that from a very early age, the gaokao instills a gladiatorial mindset into Chinese students. Instead of promoting the warmth of collectivism, China’s education system incentivizes cold individualism.
But when compared to the US system, China’s model appears less cruel than it does at first glance. Although rich Chinese families spend more money on their children than their poor counterparts, students from families in the top wealth quintile are only 2.3 times more likely to go to an elite college than those from the bottom quintile. In the United States, the wealthy are eleven times more likely to send their kids to the most prestigious universities.
For all of its faults, a univariate standardized testing system is relatively more meritocratic and allows for higher social mobility. But social mobility is not the be-all and end-all. In a society characterised by massive inequalities, meritocracy more often serves as a system for legitimizing these disparities rather than correcting them. If exams are seen to be fair, then it is much harder to take issue with the winners and losers.
What The Highest Exam implicitly reveals is that the gaokao is symptomatic of a deeper problem in China: the brutally competitive and highly unequal labor market. China’s youth unemployment rate is almost 18 percent, more than double the United States’. Within the People’s Republic there is intense competition for the best jobs, with 150 to 250 résumés per job opening in the most desirable sectors. Given the K-shaped dynamic at the top and sluggish-at-the-bottom nature of the economy of many advanced capitalist countries, not attaining a high-skilled job can often mean being thrust into the low-wage, long-hour world of gig work. The cushy government jobs allocated to top students are so desirable because they provide housing, education, and health care benefits that few others can access. The gaokao’s ruthless competition “succeeds” in preparing Chinese students for life precisely because this competition matches the post-college winner-takes-all nature of the capitalist economy. Thus, the real solution to the gaokao’s problems isn’t education reform, but dealing with the extreme inequality for which the test is just a sorting mechanism.
If China became a more equal society with a progressive tax structure that invested in universal social services, much of the gaokao’s stress would disappear, as the stakes of the tournament would be vastly lower. A poor test score wouldn’t translate into lower wages, bad educational opportunities, or a lack of health insurance. It would be much easier for families across the People’s Republic to slow down the race for educational arms proliferation.
The perception of the gaokao’s meritocracy is in practice a barrier to a more egalitarian People’s Republic. China’s social institutions are notoriously corrupt and systematically favor the wealthy and well connected. As Yuen Yuen Ang has shown, bribing officials with “access money” is a key ingredient to business success. Because the gaokao is fairer than these institutions, the distribution of jobs and security that it produces is seen as justified. This has had effects on social attitudes in the country. Surveys show that most Chinese citizens believe that poverty is due to individual failings like laziness or lack of talent. Only 25 percent of survey respondents believed there should be redistribution from the rich to the poor. If the gaokao tournament is fair, then its losers are seen as deserving of their suffering.
All of this means that the gaokao’s problems lie in the deeper ills of China’s political economy. The challenges posed by a highly bifurcated K-shaped economy cannot be easily solved by educational reform. Given China’s current economic trajectory, students and parents have little cause for optimism.