It must have something to do with the difficulties in getting into university. There are about 80,000 students who complete form 5 and sit for the HKCEE - not counting repeaters - each year. Among them, only about 36,000, or 45% get into form 6. Among the 36,000, only about 18,000, or 50%, score high enough in the A Level Examinations to meet the minimum requirements for university. However, there are only about 14,000 first year places in the degree programs in local universities. So, in the end, only about 18% of the 80,000 who complete secondary school each year can enter local universities. In addition, a few thousand (the number is very hard to determine) who are fortunate enough to have rich parents, civil servant parents, or both, get to attend universities overseas.
It is a competition that starts when a child enters kindergarten. It is often said that if you don’t get into the right kindergarten, your chance of getting into university drops significantly. Ditto with primary and secondary school. No wonder so many students enroll in tutor schools, to get that extra edge. And so many give up completely long before they sit for the HKCEE.
4 comments:
It's probably also due to the high cost of living in HK nowadays, and the fact that even with a university degree, many will struggle to make ends meet. And a bachelor's degree isn't enough, you have to have one or two postgrad degrees as well. And if you don't even have a degree... well, the odds of having a comfortable life then are pretty much minuscule.
Only a fraction (18%) of young people get to university. If even university graduates find it hard to earn a comfortable living, it means the rest are not really doing so well. Hong Kong is getting more and more polarized. It is not a good situation.
Tutorial schools only hava an edge when the exam questions are pretty predicable and consisted of closed type of questions. Furthermore, they cannot survive on its own without students having obtained the basic concepts and foundation from a normal school. Ah Tien (Michael Tien) recently (15 September) published an article on tutorial schools in the HK Economica Journal. Ann
I quite agree with what he said. Part of the problem is the exam driven culture and the emphasis on close-ended questions. The sad result is more than just tutorial schools. But students who do not think for themselves. Who concentrates on guessing at what the teachers want them to answer.
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