Tea Leaf Nation says:
According to the Sina Weibo account of Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily (@人民日报), rural children “no longer want to jump the ‘dragon’s gate,’” a Chinese traditional saying that means to change one’s fate. The People’s Daily wrote, “With the [exam] approaching, [one] niece suddenly decided to give up on it. While her cousin was very concerned about it, the niece reacted peacefully: ‘Four years of college will cost more than 20,000 RMB [about US$3,200] every year, in the end it’s still hard to find a good job, so it’s better to work right now.’ The unwillingness to ‘jump the dragon’s gate’ is because of the unequal distribution of educational resources in the rural and urban areas, as well as the unfair competition to which it leads. [The problem] starts in kindergarten and continues up to middle school; rural kids are losing at the starting line.”'