The Next Step of the 9.33 Million Fighters

The Hechinger Report followed up with me after the China Scope NYC Conference in March 2011, and they produced a chart of better quality than my own ppt illustrations to demonstrate the hours Chinese students spend on studying by stages of a student when s/he is climbing up along the school system.

And then the big days came for the 9.33 million fighters on Jun 7th to 9th: Gao Kao-- the college entrance exam. This year, according to the Chinese Education Ministry's University Recruiting Plan, 72% of the exam takes, or, 6.72 million freshmen students will enroll to college in September. Would the exam-kungfu-warriors be expecting that a lot of them will spend a significant amount of their precious college years "meditating" in classrooms like this?



Especially when the graduates from college this year hits a historical peak 7.58 million, with a 89% employment rate after 6 months of searching , I hope the class of 2011 will not have to fight again as how they did through their K-12 years when they will go to the labor market in 2015. After all, a scene like the one below is not encouraging to anyone who believes that "education makes a difference" when they know the crowds are fighting for jobs which pays less than $300/month.