Also consider that Chinese people who study abroad are paying the full sticker price of a US university, so it's really not any sort of representative sample of Chinese education. Hell, paying full sticker price for a US education is a tough lift for most Americans, who have higher standard of living.

A lot of Chinese students paying for full priced universities abroad is a long term strategic move by the family and/or family owned business backing them. That's why you can often see families paying for $50,000 USD/year high school abroad even. The plan is 1. start to develop a foothold overseas, 2. then move money over, 3. then get one family member with a foreign passport and 4. keep building a stronger base for emigration and large scale eventual shift of wealth. It's not equivalent to US private middle-class citizens paying for the same institutions.

> The news is everywhere: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%88%9D%E5%8D%87%E9%AB%98+... , for a long time.

The top results (for me) all say that it's not literally correct that only 50% of middle school students make it to high school, but most (suspiciously) only mention numbers for Beijing. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/368135272 has a table covering every province, showing that the rate goes from 53.11% in Henan to 70.49% in Heilongjiang.

First of all, not everything is an "argument." How about a discussion? I'm not interested in an argument.

It's interesting that there's no calculus on the gaokao. It's an elective in high school (same as the US). I wouldn't have guessed that. However, some very basic linear algebra does seem to be in the compulsory high school math curriculum(1). More than I learned in high school in the US, anyways.

Also, generally the private schools are considered worse options. The elite students with the highest middle school test scores mostly go to public high schools. Maybe students at the private high schools are more likely to go overseas, and so they are more likely to take the calculus electives. But even among the private school students, only a small percentage will go overseas.

For the vocational school thing, I had no idea it was so extensive. Very interesting. I knew about sports high schools, where most of the graduates go on to teacher colleges and become PE teachers. What other kinds of vocational high schools are there? How does it work for smaller cities - how many special types of vocational school can they really support?

(1) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%AB%98%E4%B8%AD%E6%95%B0%E5%...

My bad. By argument I meant “ a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong.”, as in you have a point, and offers a number of arguments to support the point

I knew what you meant. A better way for me to put it would have been: "I wasn't making a counter argument, just telling you my current understanding and the reasons for it." To me there's a big difference in attitude. I'm not sitting here coming up with a perfect counter-argument, both because I don't want to put that much effort in and because I don't think it's an effective way to learn.