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<p>This doesn’t mean anything.</p>
<p>It has quadrupled from what? 5% ? 50%? You can see how voicing the exact proportionate of college-educated Chinese a decade ago will change the meaning of this article completely.</p>
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<p>Such as? I do not have experience with this particular communist state, but one would think that they have welfare.</p>
<p>Two items:</p>
<p>I think the writer is engaging in sensationalist sophism, as illustrated by his clever non-use of statistics. So, rural kids receive worse educations than their urban (indeed, in underdeveloped economies, this is the material distinction) peers, and far worse than their rich urban peers. Is this new? So, number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the past decade. Where has it not? The only informative aspect of that is that the girl’s parents are absolutely doing the right thing by keeping her in school, because if the trend is such, Chinese without a college education will be relegated to mining in a rural village forevermore, and their children will go to precisely the same school that had previously failed them. If there is indeed an oversupply of college graduates in China, I doubt it reaches anywhere near the catastrophic Western one. That said, nowadays, an oversupply of college graduates is a tautology - because everybody is a college graduate.</p>
<p>Secondly, can people show some basic compassion please? You think this girl doesn’t feel the pressure to perform? You think she doesn’t understand that her parents are staking EVERYTHING on her? Of course she’s gonna call them and tell them she doesn’t want the responsibility - what 20 year old would? Ultimately, fact is, it’s not yet her place to decide how her parents spend THEIR money, and if they (rightly) believe that educating her is the best investment they can make with it, she’ll just have to suck it up and read more textbooks. I see this as a deep psychological tragedy more than as some sort of economic warning.</p>