Asia’s parents suffering ‘education fever’

By Yojana Sharma, BBC

Zhang Yang, a bright 18-year old from a rural town in Anhui province in China was accepted to study at a prestigious traditional medicine college in Hefei. But the news was too much for his father Zhang Jiasheng.

Not sports stars, but Chinese parents seeing off their children to take exams

Zhang’s father was partly paralysed after he suffered a stroke two years ago and could no longer work. He feared the family, already in debt to pay for medicines, would not be able to afford his son’s tuition fees.

As his son headed home to celebrate his success, Zhang Jiasheng killed himself by swallowing pesticide.

Zhang’s case is an extreme. But East Asian families are spending more and more of their money on securing their children the best possible education.

In richer Asian countries such as South Korea and emerging countries like China, “education fever” is forcing families to make choices, sometimes dramatic ones, to afford the bills.

There are families selling their apartments to raise the funds to send their children to study overseas.

‘Extreme spending’

Andrew Kipnis, an anthropologist at Australian National University and author of a recent book on the intense desire for education in China, says the amount spent on education is “becoming extreme”.

It is not just middle-class families. Workers also want their children to do better than themselves and see education as the only means of ensuring social mobility. Some go deep into debt.

“Families are spending less on other things. There are many cases of rural parents not buying healthcare that their doctors urge on them… Part of the reason is that they would rather spend the money on their children’s education,” said Mr Kipnis.

“Parents may be forced to put off building a new house, which they might have been able to do otherwise,” said Mr Kipnis who did the bulk of his research in Zouping district in Shandong province, among both middle-class and rural households.

“It can be very intense. They often borrow from relatives. Of course some people have difficulty paying it back,” said Mr Kipnis.

A Euromonitor survey found that per capita annual disposable income in China rose by 63.3% in the five years to 2012, yet consumer expenditure on education rose by almost 94%.

Read the full article by Yojana Sharma from BBC.