Disparities in education found in districts
Print Edition
IT costs a Chinese family roughly about 800,000 yuan (US$113,665) to raise a child from birth to middle school (ninth grade) in Shanghai, a report released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences showed.
The academy’s city and population development research team carried out the survey in downtown Jing’an District and suburban Minhang District in July and August.
The researchers found that it costs a family nearly 840,000 yuan on average to raise a child in Jing’an, with over 510,000 yuan spent on education. In Minhang, it costs an average of 763,100 yuan, including 520,000 yuan for education.
Low-income families were found to spend a higher percentage of their salary on education, meaning the burden on them is higher when it comes to supporting a child.
In Jing’an, families earning between 50,000 and 90,000 yuan per year spend about half of their income on their children. Those earning less than 50,000 yuan spend more than 71 percent on child-rearing, including 43.82 percent on education.
In Minhang, more than 71 percent of spending incurred on children was for education. Families with incomes higher than 500,000 yuan per year spend nearly 1.27 million yuan on their children from birth to middle school.
Those earning less than 50,000 yuan per year spend three-fourths of their income on education.
“I doubt if low-income families would spend so much on their children’s education, but it’s natural for middle-income families to spend more than 50,000 yuan per year,” said Fu Rui, whose daughter is in first grade in Minhang.
“Many of my daughter’s classmates are attending cramming classes after school,” she said.
“We spend nearly 20,000 yuan a year on English classes and another 20,000 yuan on dancing, painting and piano. As she is now in primary school, we also plan to send her for extra classes in other subjects like Chinese and math, and summer or winter camps.
“I estimate these will cost at least another 40,000 yuan per year,” she said.
“Programming is also popular now and I’m thinking about letting her try it. There will be a trade-off, but I think it will be well above 50,000 yuan a year in total,” she said.
In a previous citywide survey conducted between 2012 and 2017 of more than 3,000 students in seven local schools, over 25 percent of families spent more than 10,000 yuan annually on cramming.
Zhou Haiwang, deputy director of the academy’s city and population development research institute, said the high cost of education has become one of the reasons why young couples are quite reluctant to have children.
On cramming classes, the report found that students attending the extra classes in Chinese scored about three points higher on average in tests. The advantage for crammers was nine points in math and 12 points in English.
The survey also found that students spent 2.86 hours a day studying at home on average in 2016, up 0.33 hours from the time they spent in 2011.
Only sixth graders spent less time studying, by about 7 minutes per day, over the same period. Third graders saw the biggest increase: They devoted 2.88 hours per day on homework, about one hour more than in 2011.
In an interesting finding, when girls and boys study for half an hour at home, girls score 85.48 points on average in tests, but boys manage only 66.86 points.
Boys had to study 4.5 hours to score 85.44 points, while girls could manage 89.05 points after studying just 3.5 hours at home.
The survey found that students in downtown Jing’an District had a higher average score than those from suburban Jiading and Qingpu districts in 2011 and in 2016. But Jing’an’s average score declined by 2.29 points from 2011 to 81.7 in 2016; while Qingpu’s increased by 10.44 points to reach 68.88.
Zhou concluded that the imbalance of education quality in different districts was still serious and deserves attention from authorities.
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