Abstract:

The Special Program of colleges and universities is a compensatory policy for admission opportunities to promote the high-quality educational equity and solve the difficulty of rural students to go to good universities. Descriptive statistical methods were used to track the enrollment of two elite universities under the Special Program from 2018 to 2023. Judging from the overall scale and tendency of the number of students who passed the “initial review”, got the “score reduction” and achived the “final admission”, the Special Program have been strengthened in recent years, more and more students from poor families have entered elite universities. At the same time, the actual enrollment of the Special Program in elite universities showed a distinct feature of “uneven compensation and excessive selection”. Rural students and schools in economically and educationally underdeveloped provinces were not compensated for more high-quality admission opportunities in the Special Program. An important reason is that they were at a disadvantage in the independent selection of elite universities and the selection of college entrance examination. In the next step, to promote the “substantive educational equity”, we should adjust the enrollment methods and related policies of the Special Program, establish the value orientation of “compensation first while taking into account selection” and put it into practice.

Key words: the Special Program, compensation, selection, educational equity, elite universities