Feng Dacheng and Feng Dalong, twin brothers from a poor rural family in Jilin province, had always believed only one of them would go to university, while the other would be forced to give up his dream due to financial constraints.
Yet, on Wednesday, both were enrolled at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing thanks to policies meant to help students from impoverished circumstances.
The brothers are among 36 students who will receive subsidies and tuition loans of up to 240,000 yuan ($37,500) from the college this year.
To help rural youngsters hampered by financial difficulties, Tsinghua University assigned staff members to collect information on potential university students through the media and the Internet, said Xiang Hui, deputy director of student affairs.
Researchers saw a news report about one person who got a part-time job on a construction site in central Henan province to save money after being accepted by the college. He was given 2,000 yuan for his living expenses and train ticket to Beijing.
"I was so worried about the tuition fees," said Su, a freshman who did not want to be identified.
"I never imagined the university would give me not only a loan for my tuition, but also a free bicycle, mobile phone and bedding."
Tian Jibin, who is also a freshman and hails from Qingyang county in Northwest China's Gansu province, complained that generally it is "too hard for rural students to enter the top colleges" in China. He graduated from the best senior middle school in his county, yet he is the only one in his school enrolled at Tsinghua University.
Tsinghua received 3,349 students this year and less than 15 percent were from rural schools below the county-level, according to the college's admissions office. In 2010, 17 percent of the freshmen there came from rural areas.
Yu Han, director of admissions at Tsinghua University, said he was concerned about the decrease.
"We have looked into it, and the university is trying to enroll a larger percentage of students from disadvantaged regions," he said.
Rural residents account for 50.32 percent of the mainland's total population of 1.34 billion, according to the sixth national census in 2010 by the National Bureau of Statistics.
However, unbalanced educational resources are still making it difficult for rural students to do well enough on exams to gain admission to China's leading universities, and only about one in five students at those universities come from the countryside.
"The rural population is much smaller in key universities than the 20 percent average at colleges in general," Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a private, non-profit education policy research body, said in an earlier interview.
According to data from the institute in 2005, 50 percent to 60 percent of students at Peking University came from the countryside in the 1950s.
This trend has been seen throughout China. The People's Daily reported that the percentage of rural students enrolled by Beijing's China Agricultural University fell from 39 percent in 2001 to 31 percent in 2007, while at Nankai University in Tianjin the rate fell from 30 percent in 2006 to 24 percent in 2008.
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