Ken Ellingwood writes in the CHE:

The young people I teach at Nanjing University recognize how far they've come, writing in biographical essays about parents who scrimped and sacrificed to pay for English tutors and Saturday math classes starting in grade school—all in the hope that higher education would prove the key to a better life for their children.

One young woman recounted how her father had quit his job so he could shuttle her to the best school in their city in northern China. She was 6 at the time. "I only remembered that the best time of those days is sitting on his bike, grasping the hem of his coat, and talking about my school life in a flood of words," she wrote. A "few years later, I realized that his resignation resulted in his job instability thereafter." In China, the ticket to social mobility gets stamped in school. Sound familiar, America?

By some estimates, nearly a third of China's population of more than 1.3 billion falls between the ages of 18 and 35, making it a demographic segment worth watching, at a moment of dizzying possibility and uncertainty. The students in my class are freer than their parents were to pursue the careers of their choice. But they eye a job market that grows more competitive by the day as a wave of university construction across China generates an ever-swelling ocean of graduates. Some seven million Chinese students were expected to don caps and gowns during the commencement season this spring. A bachelor's degree no longer seems a VIP ticket to success; in response, applications to graduate schools have jumped.

Read more: http://chronicle.com/article/Young-GiftedChinese/140819/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en