Why it still pays to get a good gaokao score

Thursday marks the start of the annual national college entrance examination, or gaokao, the score of which decides which domestic college a high school graduate will go to.

In an age when lifelong learning has become a dominant trend, the role of gaokao is becoming less important than it was decades ago. In 2023, 4.74 million college graduates sat for the national postgraduate entrance examination, almost a million more than the 3.77 million who sat for it in 2021. Considering that the total number of college graduates in 2023 was 10.47 million, that means more than one-third of the graduates strive for higher learning, which is considerably high.

True, although the gaokao still decides which college one will go to, even without a good performance in the exams one can have a bright future, so it is no more "the decisive exam for one's fate" as it was two decades ago. Some have even gone to the extent of saying that the gaokao only decides which campus and with whom one is going to spend the next four years of their lives.