From Imperial Examinations to the Gaokao: Does Education Offer Everyone a Future? A Chinese College Application Form

About the Topic

At eighteen, a college application form asks where to study, what to learn, what a family can afford, and how a graduate will earn a living. A young person’s wishes meet national admissions plans, university programs, and a changing job market.

I research the economics of education and have long offered public-interest advice on gaokao applications. The closer I come to ordinary families’ decisions, the more I wonder how this form came to take its present shape.

Why did Zhu Yuanzhang execute the top examination candidate and examiners in the penultimate year of his life?

Why did Zuo Zongtang, busy with military affairs in the northwest, seek examinations closer to home for Gansu scholars? Why did Republican-era universities schedule entrance tests on the same day?

Why do we hear so little of top examination scorers in the first seventeen years after 1949?

How did young people prepare hurriedly and choose universities when the examination returned in 1977?

How did expanded admissions in 1999, tuition fees, and the end of assigned jobs change families’ expectations of university?

These histories involve institutional decisions, but also travel costs, age, revision materials, and a box someone hesitates to fill in. They can help us reconsider elite universities, popular majors, and AI advice, and identify difficulties that institutions and public services might address.

We will discuss:

— How examinations from the imperial system to the gaokao distribute opportunity, and what barriers remain beyond the examination room;

— how sequential preferences, parallel preferences, and subject-group applications affect students’ ability to express and realize their wishes;

— how ordinary families can understand choices and risks amid employment changes and AI, while leaving room to adjust later.

Finally, we return to a sentence in the Xinhua Dictionary: “We all have bright futures.” How can people taking different paths retain that hope?