Illustration: Liu Rui

China's poor once had faith in the magic of education to reverse their destiny. Folk wisdom describes entering a college as "a carp leaping over the dragon's gate." But now it seems rural small fry may carp about their fate, as the dragon's teeth have been sown amid the dwindling enrollment of students from poor backgrounds in the nation's top-tier universities.

CCTV reported recently that in 2011, the number of freshmen from rural areas attending China Agricultural University dropped to below 30 percent for the first time. The number of students from farming communities attending the prestigious Peking University has plummeted to less than 10 percent. And the research by Yang Dongping, an educational scholar, shows that rural students mostly end up in local ordinary universities or vocational schools.

An experienced teacher recently lamented online, "Poor families are no longer the breeding ground for the best and brightest in our times." His sigh was echoed by an avalanche of posts online.

Chinese history is brimming with legends of rags to riches in which paupers who once led a monastic existence beaver away at study and succeed in the life-changing imperial examination.

But in this day and age, the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. College enrollees from rich or middle-class backgrounds outnumber the poor.

Howard Hoo, a lecturer at the Sociology Department of the East China University of Science and Technology, believes it manifests a deep-seated problem in socio-economic development called intergenerational transfer. Wealth can be inherited and passed on to descendants, and this is now the case for education.
 
Kids who were born with a silver spoon may reap the harvest of better educational resources in both quantity and quality, whereas kids from shanty towns or poor countryside are shunned by society.

That is to say, needy students lag way behind at where they start, while there is a smooth sailing ahead of those with wealthy parents.

Take Shanghai for example. The first stepping stone is "school district housing." Parents fight tooth and nail to purchase extortionately priced apartments near prominent elementary schools.

Schools of this sort feature capacious buildings, top-notch teaching equipment and award-wining teaching gurus. The parents almost invariably keep a close eye on kids' study. Pupils from cash-starved households, on the other hand, are stuck with old schools with rundown bungalows, stressed faculty, and relatively uninvolved parents.

The next problem is the national college entrance examination, a standardized test once depending totally on an applicant's academic skills. Yet Chinese schools are now copying Western education notions that judge students in a more "holistic" way.

They are spellbound by the idea of peppering the paper with "hot social issues." But how can students from distant and destitute regions know anything about Internet buzzwords or the name of philosophers touted by the petty bourgeoisie? But these are the standards kids are being judged on now.

Another sobering picture is that deterred by inflated tuition and disproportionately dimming prospects, more students from low-income families choose to skip universities and skip straight to work in bigger cities instead.

The significance of education was perfectly presented by the late US President John F. Kennedy, "All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent."

Education is a potential gateway to upward mobility. By years of learning, even a child from the poverty-stricken region can be the biggest thing he can be. And things will go sour if the roads to greater social status is blocked.

The worst scenario will be a caste-ridden, stagnating society, with the political and economic royalties hogging the penthouse and the invisible but numerous poor trapped in the subbasement. 

Ultimately, it falls on the government to shoulder the burden of ensuring equal opportunities in education. Getting first-rate teachers to rural regions and increasing the education budget is a start, but only that.

The author is a Shanghai-based freelance writer. opinion@ globaltimes.com.cn