Crème de la crème of China

I have a general affinity for the Chinese, and I feel fortunate in my work to be able to interact with some of the best, brightest and most dedicated and hard-working people in the country. Humility is definitely in order when working with the top officials/experts in a country of 1.3 billion!

...but I never knew the details of how one makes it to the top. Thanks to a dinner conversation with a public interest lawyer a week ago, I can now try to convey how the university selection process works (although some of the details might not be 100% correct - this is just from memory, and that is not my strong suit). The key to getting into one of the top universities in China is to score well on the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), which is a 3-day written exam. The monster exam covers 5 subjects, including English(!), Chinese, Mathematics, and History (?). If the student is in the sciences, his/her 5^th subject must be physics or chemistry (for the humanities, it is something else). Of the 9 million students (!!) who took the NCEE last June, less than one third - 2.6 million - can even enter a university this fall, as spaces are limited.

Unlike elite western universities, college admission is purely based on performance as determined by the NCEE, and the better your score, the more prestigious a school you can attend. There is a quota system to ensure good geographical distribution, which gives a chance to students from poor provinces with relatively less rigorous educational systems, but that requires that a student get the highest or second highest score for their entire highschool. Parents go to great lengths to encourage their children to study and to enable them to attend good highschools (sometimes even moving to another province for that purpose), so there is enormous pressure on students associated with the NCEE.

There is also an element of preference, as students indicate their top 3 university choices on their college application: If one performs well, one can request to attend a higher-ranking school. The whole admission process is administered centrally. Tsinghua University (photos) and Beijing University are widely recognized as the two top schools in China. Tsinghua consistently admits over 70% of all of the top 10 NCEE-ranking science students from each of the 30 provinces. Given that new enrollment is only about 3000 students each year, the degree of selectivity in a country of 1.3 billion people is impressive.

Once they begin their studies, it is probably quite an adjustment for these top students to begin competing with eachother! Maybe this is one explanation for the headline in last week's Beijing Today "23.7 percent uni-students suffering depression in Beijing".

Note: During the Cultural Revolution, the Old Gate, which was the entrance to Tsinghua, was demolished. With the donations from Tsinghua University Alumni, it was rebuilt in accordance with the original design in 1991.