You could walk into the gaokao, China’s notoriously brutal college entrance exam, fill in every multiple-choice bubble at random, scribble something resembling an essay, and walk out a college student.
Not a hypothetical. A math problem. In Heilongjiang province, the cutoff score for vocational college admission is around 90 points. If you simply guess every single-choice question — each has four options, so you hit 25% by pure chance — you score roughly 52.5 points. Add the bare minimum for showing up on essay questions: 30 for writing legibly in Chinese, 5 for copying the English prompt into the writing section, 10 for writing something in history based on common sense. That’s 97.5 points. You’re in.
The exam doesn’t test anything anymore. It’s a coin flip wearing academic robes.
Most commentary on this phenomenon frames it as “degree depreciation” — the idea that a college diploma used to mean something and now doesn’t. That framing is wrong, or at least incomplete. What’s happening in Northeast China isn’t that degrees lost value. It’s that the supply side collapsed.
Here’s the math nobody wants to sit with. In 2005, Heilongjiang’s first-tier cutoff was 582 points for liberal arts. This year, it’s around 460 — and that’s under the new score-adjustment system, which means the real equivalent is closer to 400. The floor dropped by 180 points in two decades. But the more revealing number is this: in 2024, Heilongjiang had 275,000 total college seats and only 192,000 test-takers. The universities have more chairs than bodies to fill them.
When supply exceeds demand by 43%, the word “admission” becomes theater. You’re not selecting students. You’re begging them to sit down.
People get angry about the wrong thing here. They hear “someone scored 90 on the gaokao and became a teacher” and they rage at the individual. But the real scandal is systemic: China expanded its higher education sector so aggressively — converting vocational colleges to universities, doubling undergraduate enrollment from 2.3 million to 5 million in 20 years — that it built a machine requiring 11 million students per year to feed it. And the children never came.
China’s birth rate in 2023 was 7.92 million. Subtract the children who won’t survive, won’t be physically able, won’t make it through the system. You’re looking at maybe 7 million reaching college age in 18 years. The machine is built for 11 million. That gap doesn’t shrink. It metastasizes.
Universities aren’t institutions of learning anymore. They are real estate with a curriculum attached, and the mortgage is coming due.
The uncomfortable truth no one in education policy will say out loud: the credential system has always been a sorting mechanism, not a knowledge-acquisition system. The gaokao never proved you learned something — it proved you could outcompete your peers for a scarce resource. Remove scarcity and the signal becomes noise. A teacher who scored 500 two decades ago and a teacher who scored 350 today might have identical raw ability. The difference is that 500 used to mean “you beat out 80% of the field” and 350 now means “you existed during a year when seats outnumbered applicants.”
And here’s the twist that should keep every parent and every hiring manager awake: the rest of the world is 15 years behind Northeast China on this curve, but heading in the exact same direction. Japan has already watched universities close. South Korea is shuttering departments. The demographic math doesn’t care about national pride or institutional prestige.
The degree was never the knowledge. The degree was the scarcity. And scarcity is the one thing you cannot manufacture.
So what happens next? The vocational college cutoff will disappear entirely — it’s functionally already gone. Then the bottom tier of undergraduate programs will follow. Then the middle tier. Universities will merge, close, or transform into something unrecognizable. The credential arms race won’t end because people got wise; it’ll end because the ammunition ran out.
If you’re a parent, stop treating the system as a reliable signal of anything. If you’re a hiring manager, stop using the degree as a proxy for competence — it was always a lazy heuristic, and it’s now a broken one. And if you’re an institution counting on tomorrow’s tuition to pay for yesterday’s expansion, start planning your exit now.
The collapse isn’t coming. It’s already here. We just haven’t stopped calling it an education system long enough to notice it’s a lottery.
FAQ
Q: But isn't this just a Northeast China problem caused by population outflow?
A: It's the canary, not the coal mine. Heilongjiang is 15 years ahead of the national curve, but China's national birth rate dropped below replacement and is still falling. The same math that emptied Northeast classrooms will empty classrooms everywhere — just later.
Q: What should parents actually do about this?
A: Stop treating the degree as a reliable signal. Focus on skills, networks, and adaptability. The credential you're chasing may not exist in its current form by the time your kid graduates — and even if it does, it won't mean what it meant when you earned yours.
Q: If degrees are meaningless, why do employers still require them?
A: Inertia. Employers use degrees as a lazy filter because building better assessment systems is hard. But the filter is already broken — it's letting through people who scored 90 on a 550-point exam. The market will catch up, and when it does, the companies that built real evaluation pipelines first will have a massive advantage.