Sitting at home while his daughter was at boarding school one day several years ago, Mr. Wu said he was so disappointed with his daughter’s performance that he would not mind if she dropped out, caught a train to Guangdong province, 30 hours away on the coast and took an assembly line job at a factory。

　　Odds Against Rural Youths

　　As Ms. Wu approached the national higher-education entrance exams in the spring of 2011, the odds were stacked against her, and heavy costs loomed for her parents as a result。

　　Youths from poor and rural families consistently end up paying much higher tuition in China than children from affluent and urban families. Yet they attend considerably worse institutions, education finance specialists say。

　　The reason is that few children from poor families earn top marks on the national exams. So they are shunted to lower-quality schools that receive the smallest government subsidies。

　　The result is that higher education is rapidly losing its role as a social leveler in China and as a safety valve for talented but poor youths to escape poverty. “The people who receive higher education tend to be relatively better off,” said Wang Jiping, the director general of the Central Institute for Vocational and Technical Education in China。

　　Top four-year universities in China have resisted pressure to expand enrollments. So roughly half of all college students now attend a growing number of less prestigious three-year polytechnics instead。

　　The polytechnics resemble community colleges in the United States, but they offer more specialized vocational training and fewer general-knowledge courses like history or literature。

　　Affiliated with provincial and local governments or run by private businesses, polytechnics charge up to twice as much tuition as top universities, which are owned, operated and heavily subsidized by the central government. Despite high tuitions, the polytechnics spend much less teaching each student than universities because they receive so few subsidies。

　　While the central government offers extensive, need-based grants and loans for students at four-year universities, little financial aid is available for students at polytechnics to help pay higher tuitions. Yet students at polytechnics tend to be from poor or rural backgrounds. China’s education ministry said last year that 80 percent of students at polytechnics were the first in their families to go into higher education。

　　The national entrance exam heavily favors affluent urban children. Top universities, concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai, give preference to local high school students, admitting them with lower exam scores than students from elsewhere. Rural students have to score higher to get in。

　　That is doubly difficult because a crucial section of the exam tests competence in a foreign language, almost always English. Rural schools like Ms. Wu’s struggle even to find English teachers。

　　Most students at Peking University, one of the country’s most prestigious, come from such affluent backgrounds that researchers last summer had to suspend a long-running survey that rewarded students with second-class train tickets if they would write about changes in their hometowns. The students began refusing to write the essays because they were not interested in second-class tickets, preferring costlier seats on new bullet trains。

　　For Ms. Wu, coming from a less affluent family, the challenge of getting into a top university would prove too great。

　　Student in a Big City

　　Ms. Wu passed the national college entrance exam, but just barely。

　　She scored 300 points out of a possible 750, slightly above the 280 threshold for being allowed to attend an institution of higher education. It was far below the 600-plus scores needed for the nation’s finest four-year universities. So she attends a polytechnic in the metropolis of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province。

　　What tripped her up on the exam was her weakness in English. By contrast, she did well in Chinese and other subjects。

　　Her elementary school back in Hanjing has now begun teaching English starting in kindergarten, she said, adding that she hoped the next generation would fare better on the national test。

　　Ms. Wu has tried, unsuccessfully so far, to do well enough in classes at her polytechnic to transfer to an affiliated, four-year university, where the tuition is 25 percent lower。

　　The Chinese government offers a few scholarships for polytechnic students, but they are distributed mostly based on grades, not financial need. Top students, often from more affluent families who could give them more academic support during their formative years, receive grants that cover up to three-quarters of their room and board。

　　Average students like Ms. Wu pay full cost and hear frequent complaints from their parents. “I tell my daughter to study harder so she can reduce the school fees,” Mrs. Cao said。

　　But studying is almost all that Ms. Wu does. She says she still has no boyfriend: “I have friends who have boyfriends and they argue all the time. It is such a hassle。”

　　The big question for Ms. Wu and her family lies in what she will do on graduation. She has chosen to major in logistics, learning how goods are distributed, a growing industry in China as ever more families order online instead of visiting stores。

　　But the major is the most popular at her school, which could signal a future glut in the field. That is a sobering prospect at a time when young college graduates in China are four times as likely to be unemployed as young people who attended only elementary school, because factory jobs are more plentiful than office jobs。

　　Ms. Wu realizes the odds against her. Among those who graduated last spring from her polytechnic, she said, “50 or 60 percent of them still do not have a job。”

　　Mrs. Cao is already worried. The family home across the road from the abandoned coal mine is starting to deteriorate in the wind and acrid pollution, and they have scant savings to rebuild it. Her husband has been able to move home after being hired at a new mine in Hanjing as a drilling team leader. The extra responsibility allows him to almost match his pay at the desert coal mine, but at his age carrying a heavy drill is becoming more difficult, and he won’t be able to continue doing hard labor forever. Their daughter is the parents’ only hope。

　　“I’ve only got one, so I have to make sure that one takes care of me when we get old,” Mrs. Cao said. “My head is killing me with thinking, ‘What if she can’t get a job after we have spent so much on education?’ ”

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