Reading, a thousand-year-old treasure of traditional knowledge, is regarded as a magic key to change one's fate. Especially in modern society, academic qualifications seem to have become a passport to the door to wealth. However, when we dig deeper into the data, we find that the rate of return on education is gradually decreasing.
The Chinese Human Capital Report 2023 released by the Central University of Finance and Economics is like a mirror that reflects this trend. The report shows that with the increase in education coverage, the return to education in cities and towns is declining year by year. For men, it fell from 8.3% in 2008 to 5.7% in 2020, while for women, it fell from 10.0% to 6.0%. In the future, this rate of return is likely to continue to decline. More worryingly, given the rising cost of education, the actual rate of return will be even more meager after deducting fees such as tuition. This means that it is becoming increasingly difficult to earn a higher income by simply upgrading your academic qualifications.
To demystify the declining rate of return to education, we need to look at both the supply and demand sides. From the supply side, the expansion of domestic universities and people's thirst for higher education have gradually lost their scarcity, and the number of highly educated people in the labor market is increasing day by day. On the demand side, China's slowdown has led to a shrinking job market, and the chances of ordinary people getting a good salary are becoming increasingly slim.
One netizen believes that reading cannot change fate, in fact, fate is determined at birth. Some netizens left a message saying that a philosophy I had read before, the watershed in life is amniotic fluid. Some netizens feel that reading cannot change fate, reincarnation is a science, and reincarnation is far more important than studying hard.
In the torrent of the times, individuals are like drifting ships, and it is no longer the smooth road of the past to achieve a class leap through reading. In today's world, the ocean of knowledge is vast, but the barriers of class seem to be stronger. In the past, "the book had its own golden house", but now it needs more effort and wisdom to explore.
Reading used to be a ladder for countless children from poor families to cross classes, but now, this ladder seems to be getting steeper and harder to climb. It is no longer the cause of one generation, but it takes the joint efforts of three generations to hopefully touch the unreachable other side.