The 'High-Schoolization' of University Education

If, like me, you went to university once in the 1990s and again in the 2020s, you might be quite surprised by the changes in Chinese higher education. Because today's Chinese universities are becoming more and more like high schools: some so-called university students today have little freedom, their class hours are tightly scheduled, courses offer little choice, and extracurricular activities are far less rich than before university expansion.

When students travel in groups on holidays, the school keeps the strings drawn very tight: students must sign and report daily, for fear that an accident befalls them away from campus and parents come to the school to make trouble. So whether I organize a group outing at school or organize a study group, I find an opportunity to report it to the teacher in some way, lest they become nervous. Reporting on my own is better than letting the teacher send people to ask around; during school one must learn to be a "transparent person," because the school is not comfortable with students' opaque behavior.

University counselors have become more and more like high-school head teachers, but with far more pressure. A high-school class has only a few dozen people, while a university counselor oversees as many as 100-plus students. They care for students' study and life like nannies, must keep their phones on 24 hours a day, and are also responsible for worrying about students' employment. When students have conflicts, they are the ones who resolve them; if a safety incident occurs, the counselor's career is not only greatly affected, but may leave a lifelong psychological shadow.

There is an interesting sentence in a report in Sanlian Lifeweek, roughly meaning that today's university counselors are like a besieged city: those outside want to get in, those inside want to get out, but trapped by reality, every day they waver between wanting to resign and not daring to.

The young counselors at our school are mostly post-95s or even post-00s; when I first went to university, they were perhaps not yet born or merely infants in swaddling clothes. Now they have become the "class moms" and "class dads" who worry about students' safety every day. Moreover, in today's universities, counselors must not only be class moms and dads but may also teach courses such as career guidance, labor education, and current-affairs and situation education; student employment has become one of their performance-review tasks. So this job is extraordinarily difficult.

Some students really are a handful. A girl joked with me that the most effective way to ask a counselor for leave is not a leave note but sending a photo. She said that last time she took a photo of her heart rate at over 140 and sent it to the counselor, who appeared before her within two minutes. I said, "You child are really mischievous; when the counselor sees your heart rate over 140, her own heart rate will shoot past 150—this is no laughing matter." From this detail one can roughly see the taut state of university counselors' nerves.

There are many reasons for the high-schoolization of today's university education. Far fewer people could enter university in the 1990s than now. Today's so-called bachelor's cutoff basically lies between the 40th and 70th percentiles provincially; before university expansion in the 1990s, that rank could not even get into a vocational college.

Back then the overall admission rate for bachelor's and associate programs did not exceed 30%, and the first-tier cutoff was basically within the top 5%. Now about half of students can be admitted to bachelor's programs; except for popular majors like medicine and policing, other vocational colleges basically admit anyone who has attended high school. This year even many private bachelor's schools no longer have score-cutoff limits. So the self-care and self-discipline of 1990s university students were indeed much better than those of today's, and the falling value of today's university diplomas is only natural.

The one-child policy also puts immense pressure on today's universities; the students now in university are basically only children at home. They are their parents' only hope; if anything goes wrong with them, a family collapses entirely. This means the social pressure universities bear now is different from before; being a university president is hard nowadays. From primary school to university, if even one student has a safety problem, the president loses a layer of skin.

My middle-school and university classmates now mostly hold important posts, and some work in university administration. The information I get from them is that their work pressure is far greater than mine. My wife now works in administration in the vocational-education system; she was on the front line before, and every class of students she led made her nerves taut for at least half a year.

Because the first half-year after a class collective is formed is the most complicated, busiest, and most accident-prone time. So for the first half-year of each new class she led, she spent a great deal of time in the classroom, dropping by whether there was business or not. Sometimes she would sneak into the back row to see what the students were doing, observe their behavior, and prevent mishaps. Even so, during her teaching career there were incidents of students fighting and stealing, though fortunately no more serious major casualty events occurred.

After teaching for more than twenty years, her hair has turned white far faster than mine. Many times I urged her to resign and come home; my earning a living alone would be enough. But she is a very independent woman, and with a graduate degree she always feels that if she does not work, life loses meaning. So, however hard the work, she persists; when she is suffering and tormented, she comforts herself that this job at least has winter and summer vacations, far better than most jobs.

Before the pandemic, she finally emerged from it all, transferring to the Vocational Education Research Institute to specialize in research and administration of vocational education. She only has to deal with teachers now, no longer worrying on the front line about students' safety. Although the new post is considerably more demanding than before, I can see her overall condition is much better than before; she no longer often relies on me for emotional support.

What she has been working on lately is having university graduates return to vocational schools for full-time vocational education. Beijing always sets the trend; now, because of employment difficulty, some bachelor's graduates are flowing into the vocational-education system to receive vocational education anew—an unexpected social phenomenon. This phenomenon is well worth social reflection: how should today's high-schoolized university education be improved to better meet society's needs? We cannot keep endlessly turning out large numbers of unemployable university graduates. I am not an education expert and cannot give the answer; I only hope the education world resolves this issue as soon as possible.

In universities, it is not only presidents and counselors who are under pressure; teaching faculty generally face all kinds of psychological pressure. Because of my age and life experience, my interactions with teachers at school differ from those of ordinary students. From daily contact I can clearly feel that many teachers are under considerable pressure.

There are not many teachers older than I am at our school, so most of them, while teaching, also carry family pressures such as raising children and caring for the elderly. In today's grimmer economic climate, they also worry about unemployment, pay cuts, or illness striking themselves or their families; some may even be suffering these very problems.

Their teaching load is unimaginably large; one major-subject teacher at our school teaches 500-plus students at once, which of course makes it hard to achieve good results. My son has exchanged and studied in Japan, Singapore, and the United States; in developed countries and regions, the faculty-student ratio for major subjects is generally around 1:15. Such a ratio not only ensures teaching quality but also lightens the teachers' burden. We have not yet reached this level; this gap we must squarely face.

This week, the teacher of one of our major courses, during lab class, found that the students knew nothing when asked, and in some agitation and anger directly ordered a test the following week, using it to push students to study. If students do not learn the course well, the teacher's teaching responsibility is pursued. But if I had to teach 500-plus students at once, I would not hesitate to resign, because I know it is impossible to do well. From this angle, after expansion the teaching quality of universities is even worse than that of high schools; high-school faculty-student ratios are never this absurd.

The night before last I attended another lab class. This one was not led by my own course teacher but by a lab instructor I was meeting for the first time. At a glance I saw her child doing homework in her office; the child's schooling must have been a great worry, and the students' feedback during class did not reassure her. This lab instructor, both teacher and mother, was in poor spirits throughout the class.

So when another lab teacher in class said that nearly everyone nowadays has anxiety and depression, I was not surprised at all. From that teacher's remarks about doing graduate school in the 2000s, I could roughly judge that he should be about my age, right in the critical stage of "having both elderly above and children below." He had deep-set eyes and obvious dark circles; his physical condition may not be as good as mine. We cooperated happily in lab class—he asked, I answered; I asked, he answered—and the whole lab class was not lonely at all.

From time to time he would burst out with a piece of "metaphysical" talk that was hard not to laugh at. For example, when discussing the functions of the major papillae on the tongue, he said that, affected by sunspots, people globally are now in low spirits and need to eat something delicious to provide emotional value; the taste buds among our circumvallate, fungiform, and foliate papillae can help us cheer up. At first it sounds humorous, but the psychological pressure he repeatedly emphasized throughout class is likely truly present in his own heart.

I am an independent and unusual presence here—both a participant and, as it were, an observer. I have no employment pressure, no pressure of raising the elderly and children, and I do not even care whether I finally get my diploma. Driven only by interest, I have come to fulfill a wish, learn some professional knowledge, broaden my horizons, and ultimately return to TCM-centered research; this goal is not hard to reach. Hence I can only understand their pressure, not truly feel it.

But here I also have some feelings they cannot understand. For example, the pain of losing my mother, recently often triggered by the surrounding environment, and the discomfort of being treated oddly by everyone here and having people constantly approach to pry into my privacy—these, too, they cannot feel.

In the CPR first-aid class, when I walked to the center of the crowd and learned the teacher's practical operations, the teacher's astonished expression and the surrounding classmates all whipping out their phones to film me were hard for me to adjust to. During the physical fitness test in PE, not only my classmates but students from other classes on the field whipped out their phones to film me, and for every test item a crowd stood by cheering and shouting encouragement. Some children, right after filming, posted to Douyin, with no awareness of protecting personal privacy; it is hard for me to be angry with them.

As someone who dislikes being the focus in real life, I very much dislike my privacy being exposed like this. But from my first day at school, I have nonstop received all kinds of attention. During registration, the student who received me checked my ID and let out a gasp. From that gasp on, I have been in a state of being asked about everywhere in this school.

I thought I could hide in the library and quietly spend this time. But recently, classmates from other classes have kept coming to the library to "chance upon" me, follow me, and film me; the bold ones even step forward to accost and chat with me. I dare not easily reveal my truest information at school, because I have learned what terrible consequences human curiosity can sometimes cause.

When my son was about to study abroad, I looked up some materials on Paris, the world capital of mathematics. In the various universities of Paris, there are quite a few university students as elderly as I am; some even go to university white-haired. This is a very common phenomenon in developed countries. I think that in another ten-plus years, Chinese universities will also change greatly, and then there will clearly be many more elderly university students like me.

Because the data show that kindergartens in China are now closing rapidly. In a dozen-plus years, university enrollment will face a big problem. The young teachers in their twenties and thirties now working in universities will, by then, be right at my present age; most of them will probably not have the freedom I now have.

They too will have to feed their families. By then China, like today's developed Europe and America, will have many middle-aged and elderly people going back to university for retraining. Perhaps only then will middle-aged and elderly university students like me truly avoid being treated oddly!

Society is developing, and universities are changing. As someone whose life experience differs from most, I am willing to record everything I observe. Perhaps one day these words will become research material on some sociologist's or anthropologist's desk, from which they will understand part of the true face of China's social transformation.