1m yuan awards await top graduates

High school graduates in Enping, a city in Guangdong province, will be awarded 1 million yuan ($163,000) each and an apartment on gaining admission to prestigious Peking and Tsinghua universities, starting in 2015.

Under an agreement signed between Enping Education Bureau and Macao tycoon Feng Huoling last week, a 30 million yuan foundation has been set up to reward outstanding high school graduates enrolled by the two top Chinese universities. Feng is the head of Macao Enping Association. The agreement runs until 2021.

All candidates must have Enping household registration, or hukou, and have studied for at least five years at the city's junior and senior high schools, said Liang Guoguang, director of the bureau.

The teachers of the successful students will also be given awards, Liang said, without giving details.

"The establishment of the foundation, which aims to further promote education in Enping, has great significance in encouraging students to study hard and for teachers to work hard to develop education in Enping."

Liang said no high school graduates from Enping have been admitted to Tsinghua or Peking universities since 2007.

"The main reason is that schools in Enping have lost accomplished teachers because they are not treated well. Many qualified students have chosen to study in cities where the education is better," he said.

Before 2007, Enping used to see one or two of its students pass the annual national entrance examinations for Tsinghua and Peking universities.

"Enping's main schools have lost around 20 qualified high school teachers with master's degrees each year since 2007," Liang said.

Wang Yiwen, a high school teacher in Guangzhou, the provincial capital, said, "The awards will help teachers and students to achieve better results in the annual national college entrance exam."

High school student Wang Chuhui said he hopes Guangzhou will also introduce such large awards for students who perform well in the national college entrance exam.

However, Tang Shengchang, a member of the National Education and Examination Steering Committee and a former principal of Shanghai High School, opposes the awards.

"To some extent, they will encourage students to work harder and try to get higher grades on the exam. But in the long run, the thing that really matters is a school's teaching level and the invisible wealth it can bring to students."

Tang said that when he was appointed principal of Shanghai High School, the teaching there was weak and the number of students admitted to prestigious universities was low.

"As the teaching level improved and even though we didn't offer material awards, the school still had more and more graduates admitted to top universities, and an increasing number of high school students chose to study there," he said.