AFTER PUBLIC COLLEGES in Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces adjusted their fees, Hainan province and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region also held hearings on doing the same. Yet a media survey shows that 76 percent of respondents believe the current fees are already too high. China Youth Daily comments:

Are the tuition fees of colleges too high? That depends on whom you ask. For middle class families who can afford to send their children overseas for college education, domestic college tuition fees are relatively cheap; yet for the rural families the tuition fees are very high.

That explains the result of the media survey. Actually, people do not oppose increasing the funding to public colleges; it is the widening social gap that they oppose. When colleges raise their tuition fees it might be a negligible cost to wealthy families, but it puts a heavy burden on poorer ones.