Ruixue Jia is a Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UCSD, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong. She serves as co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, co-director of the China Data Lab, and co-chair of the China Economic Summer Institute (CESI). Her research lies at the intersection of economics, history, and politics, examining how power structures evolve and shape economic development. Her recent work has focused on the political economy of idea formation and diffusion, with attention to the interplay among the state, education, science, and technology. Jia is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), CESifo, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She is coauthor of The Highest Exam, a book on how China’s education system affects and reflects society.
Harin Chung (CMC '29) interviewed Dr. Jia on October 21st, 2026.
With millions of students taking the Gaokao exam each June, amid intense competition and high youth unemployment, how would you explain what the Gaokao is to someone unfamiliar with it? Why does this single exam hold extreme significance for high schoolers and their families?
The Gaokao is the national college entrance exam that determines which university you will go to, and it is the single criterion. This contrasts with the U.S. system in which the SAT is just one of many criteria. In China, there are no interviews, no essays, and nothing else for most students. And why is it so important? Because it not only determines your university but follows you for your whole life. This undergraduate degree matters so much in your life because employers look at your undergraduate degree and can infer whether you have done well on the exam or not. In fact, even if you get a PhD from UC San Diego and then go back to the Chinese labor market, employers still look at your undergraduate degree. For people not familiar with this system, it seems crazy.
But it is rational for employers to care about it. The Gaokao is a very effective screening system: those who do well are both talented and hardworking. And once students are admitted, almost everyone graduates, while later screenings, such as the graduate entrance exam, are much less selective. The Gaokao score remains the strongest signal an employer has.
You describe the Gaokao not as a single high school test, but as the final phase of a lifelong "nationwide tournament" starting as early as age four or five. What is that long-term experience like for students and their families?
We call it a tournament because the exam is really the last round of the competition, but it begins at a very early age. To be able to go to the top university, you need to be in a top high school, and for that you need to be at a top middle school, and for that you need to be at the top primary school. So, in big cities, children start tutoring at four or five, even before primary school. Parents have a saying: don’t let your child lose at the starting line.
This system influences every aspect of family life. It shapes where they live, what home they buy, how they spend their weekends, and where their money goes. For the students, it means what they learn very much revolves around what would be on the test. There is little time left for things that are not tested.
Student registration for the 2026 Gaokao fell by 450,000 students from the previous year, marking the second consecutive year of decline. For an exam long seen as the sole gateway to a successful life in China, what is the significance of that trend?
This trend doesn’t necessarily reflect any change in the exam system. Part of it is about who registers, and the big demographic decline is still ahead of us: births in China have roughly halved over the past decade, much like in Korea. There are still a lot of students taking the exam, say about 13 million this year. But compared with last year, you are right that it is declining.
What does this mean for the exam? Does this mean the exam is losing its grip? I guess not. The underlying reason why it is still so intense is because the system is very hierarchical. It's not difficult to go to one college nowadays. In China, 80% of the exam takers will be accepted by some college. In some sense, you would think that students should not worry too much about going to college. Yet people worry so much because it's more about competing in a hierarchical system and the need to go to an elite college. In China, with Peking University, Tsinghua University, there is a very fine-grained hierarchy. This matters a lot for the labor market, and that's why the competition is so intense. In that sense, even if the cohort size shrinks by, say, 20 percent, it would not help a lot, as the same hierarchical logic and pressure underlies this system.
In your research, you found that the poorest 25% of Chinese households spend up to 57% of their income on education, whereas wealthy students are still twice as likely to gain college admission. How does the Gaokao reinforce structural inequality while maintaining its public legitimacy as a fair system?
The test system is a clever system for governance in that it looks fair at face value. It's a single test. In China, different provinces can have different tests. But at least within a province, the same test happens on the same day. Then, the exams are graded anonymously. It looks fair. But when students arrive on test day, families have had to invest a lot. That is already affected by a lot of inequality. In the Chinese case, different provinces have different quotas. If you are from Shanghai or Beijing, you are much more likely to go to a better college because you, by design, have a much larger share of the quota. Whereas, if you are from Shandong, my province, then you have lower quotas. Where you are born is important. Moreover, it matters how much your family could invest in preparing for the test. It matters whether you are from an urban area where you have good pre-college education, or from a rural area where you can only access low-quality schools. All this matters before test day. In other words, it is a long road to the test and inequality matters, despite it looking fair on the day of the test. From a governance perspective, the system is attractive because people buy into it. But in reality, it's much more complicated.
Why do Chinese families still buy into this system? It's because they are very much worried about the alternative. The expectation is that if China used the American system, there would be a lot of corruption and bribery. The alternative would be even more unfair and more unequal. This fear may not be so far from the truth because it's still a society where personal connections matter a great deal.
China’s "Double Reduction" policy (Shuang Jian), adopted in 2021, was created to reduce shadow education, the supplemental tutoring that takes place outside of school. Has this policy reduced the financial pressure on families, or has it pushed private tutoring underground, making it more expensive and exclusive? Can state intervention be successful in changing the high-stakes education culture?
You have already hinted that it doesn't work. It is more likely to backfire, shifting the tutoring underground. The government has quietly stopped enforcing it strictly, especially for small-scale tutoring, and you rarely hear about it anymore. When the policy was just announced, the stock of the biggest tutoring companies fell by about 90 percent within a month.
Think of this in economic terms. The tutoring has a supply side, and these companies or private individuals are providing the service. However, there is also a demand side, where families want the service. The Shuang Jian cut only the supply. As long as the demand is still there, tutoring shifts underground. Some research indicates that it is increasing inequality. In the past, a middle-class family could afford a twenty-student tutoring class. Now, with private tutoring, the classes are one-to-one and much more expensive. The irony is that a policy meant to help ordinary families ended up favoring the rich.
I am also curious about the South Korean case. Some economic research found that Korea's government placed a curfew on tutoring classes, prohibiting them from running late, and argued that the curfew worked (e.g., Kim, Ter tilt and Yum 2024 AER). I was surprised to learn this, and I still do not know why it could work. I would like to visit Korea to talk to people, because it can be a useful policy case China can learn from.
Along with China, many other Asian countries (South Korea, India, Japan, Taiwan, etc.) hold high-stakes, end-of-school entrance exams with the same intensity, resulting in many high school students facing immense psychological pressure for their future. Are there other countries in Asia where there is a strong push for reform from within the government or society?
Taiwan is a case where reform has already occurred. Taiwan used to have the very intense Liankao, the former college entrance exam. Now, there are multiple tracks. I think the pressure is much lower.
Korea is taking some steps. The government recognizes the intense pressure, but it also has competing concerns. Korea also benefits from such a system in which people work very hard. Many other related issues are involved. In the Korean case, my understanding is that the government currently cares a great deal about the fertility decline, so it wants to address the education system as a related issue.
The Chinese government has other priorities, and I would say U.S.-China competition is at the top. In that sense, the government wants to maintain this hierarchical college system in order to have world-leading universities. Given this priority, the current system works well in the sense that the people work very hard and the colleges select talented and hardworking individuals. This ultimately helps China in the high-tech sector to compete with the U.S. If the current system works well, why would the government want to reform it? The cost is borne by families, and the government is willing to accept that. That is the tension.
If you only care about pressure, its fundamental source is the hierarchical system. Therefore, the hierarchy should be reduced. The government, in principle, has the capacity to do so because Chinese universities are public. On the other hand, if you want to have leading universities, perhaps you want to have a hierarchical system. Whether the government makes any reform to relieve the pressure depends upon how it weighs different goals.
