High schoolers see future in more education

Nearly 90 percent of Chinese high school students intend to pursue higher education, according to recent research by the China Youth and Children Research Center.

The research, jointly conducted with institutions from the United States, Japan and South Korea, aims to compare the performance of high school students in the four countries.

It was based on a survey covering 3,903 high school students from China, 1,521 from the US, 2,204 from Japan and 1,618 from South Korea.

About 88 percent of Chinese respondents planned to go to college after graduation, 5.5 percent more than those from the United States who ranked second in the survey.

However, they were not as confident as American high school students when it came to the evaluation of their overall learning performance and efficiency.

Chinese students were the most independent and best at following rules, but lacked the initiative and communications skills of their American counterparts.

Only 2.8 percent of Chinese high school students intended to start working after graduation, compared with 6.6 percent of South Koreans.