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Apply for college with high scores

"Congratulations, you'll be a civil servant when you graduate!"

One day after finding out the admission result, Xu Xi received a congratulatory message from his junior high school Chinese teacher. This was the first sentence he said.

In July this year, Zhejiang candidate Xu Xi was selected by the Zhejiang Police College with a score of 635.ProfessionShe was admitted to the Zhejiang Police Academy (abbreviated as "Zhejiang Police Academy"). She is a typical good student. She attended the second-ranked key high school in the local area and has always been ranked in the top 20 among about 360 students in her grade.

635 points, this score is 40 points higher than Zhejiang Province's "special control line" (which can be understood as the first-tier line), and is not too far from Zhejiang University's minimum admission line of 664 points.

Three years ago, Xu Xi had never thought that he would be admitted to a junior college. In the minds of good students, getting into a junior college is a terrifying thing. The concept instilled by teachers and schools since childhood is that first-tier schools are the best, and the first-tier rate is also regarded as an important performance indicator by schools.

Therefore, when her father suggested that she apply for this college, the first thing she thought of was her household registration book: "If the household registration book records academic qualifications in the future, I will write that I have a junior college degree..." She didn't dare to think about it too much.

This year, Xu Xi feels that the values ​​of his teachers and parents have changed. When his teachers learned that he had passed the Zhejiang Police Examination, they said that it was great and that "you will have a job when you graduate."

Everyone seems to know thatThis college has some "special treatment" for its early admission：

"For example, for 400 graduates, the school will provide 390 police positions. But if you participate in social recruitment, maybe only one person will be admitted out of 400 people." Shen Zhe, who graduated from Zhejiang Police College this year and successfully became a prison guard, explained.

The trend of volunteering to seek stable jobs has become a prominent trend this year.This orientation has already been seen in the choices people make after college:

The number of applicants for graduate school in my country continued to rise from 2016 to 2023, and only in 2024 did it fall for the first time in eight years.The national exam is very popular. The number of applicants has increased from 1.277 million in 2020 to 3.033 million in 2024, and the application-to-admission ratio has also increased from 53:1 to 77:1。

More and more parents are starting to plan ahead for their children with the goal of getting a job in the civil service exam. Normal school students and police academy students, who "will have a job after graduation," have become the most preferred choice.

“As long as I can find a good job, it doesn’t matter if I go to college;If you can't find a good job, it's no use going to the best university” Someone summed up the mentality of candidates and parents at the moment.

During his three years of high school, Zhejiang candidate Sun Zhixiang constantly learned from the news and the discussions of people around him that"Nowadays, even a bachelor's degree holder can't find a job." "The end of liberal arts is to take the civil service exam."

High school teachers occasionally mention in class that even students in first-tier universities are "very confused, have no goals, and are always worried about finding a job."

Finally, Sun Zhixiang applied for the Zhejiang Police College. His college entrance examination score was 601, 6 points higher than the score line for male police officers in Zhejiang, and ranked second among more than 30 people in his high school class. When the class teacher heard that he applied for a junior college, he immediately asked him, "Are you losing out?"

But after the admission result came out, Sun Zhixiang's family was very happy. Sun Zhixiang's first reaction was the same: "I won't have to worry about finding a job anymore, and I won't be confused during my four years at university.。”

In order to prepare for the exam in his second year of high school, Sun Zhixiang went out of school on weekends for physical training.

Shen Zhe has been playing for 8 months since the provincial examination ended in December last year.

From time to time, he would hear his friends from other schools express their envy of him. A friend from the Department of Mathematics at Zhejiang Normal University wanted to return to Ningbo to work, and told Shen Zhe that he still had to take the postgraduate entrance examination because it was a threshold for the civil service examination. Another friend from Wuhan University of Technology, whose ideal was to work in a large company like Tencent or Huawei, also faced the situation of "passively taking the postgraduate entrance examination" after sensing the current employment pressure.

The old friends all doubted their original choices. "Their scores were good enough to be admitted to the police school. Now they are a little hesitant. Was the choice they made right?"

While other fresh graduates from other schools around him were still anxious about finding a job and whether to take the postgraduate entrance examination or the civil service examination, Shen Zhe had already seen a certain future:After passing the provincial examination, I will join a prison in Zhejiang Province in August and become a prison guard with an annual salary of around 200,000 yuan.

Unlike many of his classmates, Shen Zhe's parents are businessmen who provide guest rooms and catering services to five-star hotels. During the epidemic, Shen Zhe felt the risks of doing business in recent years through his parents' experiences. Although his parents have high incomes, they are under great pressure and are always overwhelmed. They have to constantly entertain and look for projects. In fact, they don't have much disposable income, so they "can't live a carefree life."

He observed that the civil servants around him, who were paid a "fixed salary", lived with a sense of certainty and had a high "disposable income". "All they thought about was where they could go to play, climb mountains or travel next month with this little money, rather than where they would go to make money tomorrow."

He also remembers that before 2019, when the economic environment was still good, the admission score of the police academy was "very low", "the most popular majors at that time were finance and computer science." This year, financial colleges are no longer popular. The minimum admission scores of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Central University of Finance and Economics, and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in 2024 have all dropped compared with last year. Universities such as Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, which were able to recruit full students in previous years, have vacancies this year.

Some practitioners on the Internet joked, "Have we returned to the past? The current situation is very similar to the 1980s and 1990s when technical secondary school students were popular. At that time, technical secondary school graduates could have iron rice bowls and guaranteed employment. It was very popular. Those who could not go to technical secondary schools went to high school and took the college entrance examination."

Some people are skeptical about this choice:Can going to police academy really help you solve your problems once and for all?

During the three years I studied at Zhejiang Police,Recent graduate Shen Zhe also saw the other side of this "certainty".

Although the rate of Zhejiang police officers joining the police force from the province will be as high as 95% in 2023, no one wants to be one of the remaining 5%.The competition in the provincial examinations within police academies is actually much more intense than people imagine, and it is even so difficult that it is almost the same as social recruitment.

Shen Zhe did a statistics, among the students who passed the provincial examination and successfully joined the police this year, 70% of them have reached the standard for social recruitment interviews. The scores of more than 400 candidates in four majors were pulled down, and the average score was about 128 points.The difference between the last place and the middle ranked student is only a dozen points.

Being recruited upon graduation is not as easy as candidates think. Shen Zhe found that since students who applied for these majors all had a clear purpose of getting a job, and everyone needed to compete for the quota of police officers within the school,The relationships among classmates will become alienated during the year of the provincial examination, and the atmosphere on campus will become increasingly tense.

"Everywhere I look, there are opponents." In the later stages of preparing for the exam, Shen Zhe felt a burning atmosphere gripping everyone, including himself. When he was about to take a nap, he found that his roommates had already gotten up and were carrying their bags to the library. He felt that he couldn't close his eyes peacefully either.

Before entering the school, he felt that with such a high rate of police recruitment, he "could never be in the remaining 5%", but now,This state of being able to see every "opponent" puts him under the pressure of uncertainty again.. It seems that no matter what I do, there are always people working harder than me.

The relationships among his classmates also underwent "subtle changes." He found that the friends he talked to about everything during his freshman and sophomore years suddenly had "some little thoughts of their own" during the exam preparation process.

Once, he saw his roommate taking an online course in the dormitory and asked him if he could share the course resources. He hesitated, saying "It seems that this thing cannot be shared" and "It's actually not very useful." A few days later, when he passed by, he found that his roommate was still watching the online course.

Shen Zhe understands the source of his classmates’ pressure. “The two paths of going up and going down have a profound impact on our lives.”

When people mention the police academy, they only think of the people who join the police academy.Few people noticed where those who failed the provincial exams in school went.。

Under the principle of "everything for employment", candidates and parents choose colleges that are highly oriented towards employment, but they oftenIgnore the fact that apart from getting a job, the school does not provide any more possibilities for students.

Shen Zhe pointed outThe hidden risks and costs behind the “optimal solution”。

In the past three years, he felt that everything he learned was designed to become a prison guard. Fighting, criminal psychology analysis, criminal psychology correction, prison investigation, etc. Once he did not embark on this path, these knowledge and skills would become almost "worthless."

"If you pass the exam, you will be a civil servant, with a stable and high salary. But if you fail, you will just be a person entering society with a junior college diploma, and you won't be able to use any of your knowledge or skills."

When the provincial exam results came out, Shen Zhe could never have imagined that the student who was "eliminated" was a good friend of his.This friend is not the type to slack off at all, on the contrary, he is very hardworking."I set an alarm for myself at noon every day and only sleep for 20 minutes. I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning to go to the library, and return to the dormitory at 9 o'clock in the evening."

After graduating in June this year, a friend told him that he planned to take the college entrance examination. Many of his classmates who were eliminated had to apply for the undergraduate colleges they could have gone to three years ago. After completing three years of undergraduate studies and obtaining a diploma, they took the civil service examination and re-participated in social recruitment.

"But if you can't pass the exam when you recruit 390 people out of 400, how can you expect one or two people out of 400 to pass? When many people think of this, they may give up and choose other jobs."

Shen ZheIt is hard to imagine the future career direction of these people who missed the opportunity。After being admitted to the police academy, candidates and their parents imagine the future simply as "being a policeman" and "other things".

He chatted with the hardworking friend and learned that the other party had found a short-term job during the summer vacation:Be an NPC in a script-killing store."He plans to make a transition first, because he doesn't know what other career options there are.”

Where is the shore?

Sun Zhixiang felt that he would never be the 5% who were “left behind”. Xu Xi’s father also told her directly, “If you pass the Zhejiang police exam, you’ll be in the job. Don’t worry about it anymore.”

Before hearing his father's opinion in high school, Xu Xi had never thought about becoming a police officer, let alone a prison guard. Students who are willing to apply for the police academy will be organized by the school to participate in physical training in the second semester of their second year of high school to prepare for the physical tests required by the police academy.

Xu Xi’s sports performance is not good either, and he is particularly averse to the 800-meter long-distance race.During the year of preparing for the exam, she separated herself from other students and participated in training during every morning reading and physical exercise.In the summer, do squats with a 20-pound sandbag, 20 reps in a set, four sets at a time.

At the end of one training session, Xu Xi felt sore all over and had a little heat stroke. She suddenly didn't know why she persisted. She called her father in tears and asked if she could stop training.

"I'll apply to another school, work harder in the future, and take the postgraduate entrance exams and the civil service exams. I'd rather suffer through the academic subjects than practice sports." Her father comforted her, and if she really didn't want to do it, then forget it.

But the situation is not good now, "Examination of the police academy is also another option."

Later, after meeting seniors who were studying at the police academy, Xu Xi gradually agreed with this choice and felt that wearing a police uniform was also quite handsome and had a "different feeling."

She especially remembers a girl she met when she took the physical test in Hangzhou on May 4 this year. While waiting for admission arrangements, the girls who were taking the police academy exams were sitting in a classroom. This girl sat in front of her. She had short hair and a cool look, just like a "natural police officer."

While waiting, the girl suddenly turned around and chatted with her. Xu Xi said that she might need to get 666 points in the exam to be admitted to the Zhejiang Police College, which is an undergraduate-level college. The girl laughed and said that she would call her "Sister 6" from now on. She told Xu Xi that she also wanted to apply to the Zhejiang Police College.

When Xu Xi learned that he was admitted to the Zhejiang Police Department, he started to follow the girl's updates on WeChat Moments.

In a long post on WeChat Moments, Xu Xi saw her use the second-person love letter format to sort out her struggle for her ideal of attending the police academy: "The reason I chose you was not because I was tempted by the conditions of guaranteed employment after graduation, but because I liked and admired you from the bottom of my heart."

Xu Xi's eyes welled up with tears, and she felt a kind of respect and yearning. She saw the girls' genuine desire for this profession, but she herself seemed to have never had such an ideal.

She never knew what she wanted to do. When her family asked her what she wanted to do in the future when she was a child, Xu Xi just casually said a few things she knew, "doctor, lawyer, translator." When she was in high school, her parents also asked her many times about her ambitions, but she still didn't know.

"I don't know why I have no ideas or anything I want to do." Even when it comes to her hobbies and interests, she always looks at what other people are interested in before trying them herself.

In comparison, Xu Xi is more aware of her father's ideals. He once told Xu Xi and her sister that he had a dream of becoming a policeman when he was a child, but he didn't realize it, so they had to realize it. Xu Xi accidentally communicated with her sister who was in the first grade of junior high school, and she told her that she wanted to join the army in the future. Xu Xi didn't know whether this was her sister's own idea.

Recently, between the end of the college entrance examination and the waiting period for admission, Xu Xi still did not stop studying. Although many seniors told her that this school did not require the CET-4 or CET-6, her mother still asked her to "take the exam". Not only that, she also wanted to "learn PS, spreadsheets, and other useful things during this summer vacation so that she can make money in the future".

At one point, her mother even told her to learn all the knowledge points she didn't understand in high school, such as biology, etc. Xu Xi thought it was a bit absurd.But she still followed the advice and studied for the CET-4.Unlike the other two boys, she never seemed to feel relaxed after reaching the shore.。

After the college entrance examination, she felt that she was "very lax recently and playing every day." After playing with her mobile phone for a long time, she would feel guilty.She feels that she is not a smart type and "needs to work hard and not slack off." Learning English makes her feel that she is still valuable and has something to do.

For 18 years, hard work has become a habit and even a way of life for her. But if she really succeeds, what is the goal of her hard work?

Xu Xi thought that maybe he should take the examination to upgrade from junior college to university after he started working.

Maybe "a higher education" will lead to "better promotion" and "higher salary" in the future? She is not sure. But overall, she thinks that writing "bachelor's degree" in the education column on the household registration book is definitely better than "junior college".

* At the request of the narrator, some character information is blurred

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