Fair education only way for rural kids to climb social ladder

Editor's note: A distance learning project that has livestreamed courses of a key middle school in Chengdu, Sichuan province, to 72,000 students in less developed western parts of the country over the past three years has improved the performance of many of these students, and 88 of the first batch of graduates were admitted by Peking University and Tsinghua University, the top two universities in China. China Youth Daily comments:

The project has rekindled the hope of some poor families that education can help change their children's fate. The dropout rate in some less developed regions has remained high these years as many parents refuse to spend what money they have just to send a child to college.

Many middle school students opt to leave school to work as migrant workers after finishing the nine-year compulsory education at the age of 16 or 17.