Editor's note: This article, translated from Southcn.com, briefly discusses the growing dissent amongst graduates from China's top universities towards their parents' impossible-to-fulfill expectations of them. Many of these parents have it in their minds that because their child graduated from such a prestigious university, it should be easy for them to earn a high monthly salary. What they don't take into account is the influence of external factors, such as an unstable economy, extravagant marriages and a shifting job market.

"Dad, I'm really sorry – I graduated from Peking University and became a government official, but I am not earning enough money."

With this year's graduation season now upon us, another wave of students are rushing to enter the working world. However, compared to previous years, more and more students are beginning to speak out against the immense pressures they're feeling from home to become the next big government official. An anonymous Peking University blogger posted the above apology with the follow-up question: "Do your parents really think this way?"

Further describing his dilemma, the blogger wrote: "I graduated from a M.A. program at Peking University and found a job offering a 8,000 RMB monthly salary, an end of the year bonus and a bit of free time to boot. The job seemed like a good fit for me since I don't have much of a desire for anything too luxurious. But my father had already bragged to all of my family members about how I'm going to make tons and tons of money. When he heard about this job offer, he flipped out and said that I made him ‘lose face'. He even called me up a bunch of times just to curse me out over the phone and say that, as a graduate of Peking University, I should be a city or province level official, not some lowly village level official."

For many parents and students, dreams don't equal reality

These days, anonymous posts likes the one above are becoming all too frequent on Chinese social media sites. One blogger recently posted, "My father thinks that since I graduated from Peking University with a PhD, if I'm not making at least 10,000 RMB a month, then my degree is a waste."

Another one wrote, "This year, my boyfriend and I are getting married. We're both graduate students and my boyfriend doesn't want to spend all of our savings on a lavish wedding, but our family members think that since we are Peking University students that we should be throwing ‘the party of the century'. They don't understand that we're just graduate students, and that even if we didn't spend any money for several months, we still wouldn't be able to afford a wedding on par with what they are expecting."

Posts such as these have become a hotly discussed topic with Peking University students and netizens alike, with most people agreeing that, "The pressure on Peking University students is too much! They have to work so hard just to live up to their parents' expectations!" Another blogger summed it up in the following way: "Parents already pick on their children for 20-plus years while they are in school studying. It's not until after graduating from university that they quickly realize that their parents will continue to put pressure on them to succeed for the rest of their lives; there is no way to live up to their expectations. It's always about more money or more fame."

Yesterday, Professor Xiong Bingji, an education specialist, in an interview with Southcn.com remarked, "Actually, it's not just at Peking or Tsinghua; students from all sorts of schools—especially prestigious one—feel an immense pressure from their parents to succeed. But the dream doesn't equal the reality. Going to a prestigious university doesn't mean your child will automatically get a high-paying job as a government official. This mentality leads to false hopes for the students as well as the educational system."
 

Related links
Dreading Your Wedding: Chinese Women and the Pressure to Marry
Tiger Mothers and Chinese Parenting: Is Strict Discipline Really Superior?
A Chinese Teacher's Perspective: China and the U.S. Education Systems Compared 

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Keywords: Chinese parents pressure children to succeed parents expectations of university graduates in China