A Day Inside China's Elite High Schools: An Engineering Generation Built by Elimination

Half of Them Will Be Engineers

China's bet on engineering is not a slogan but a decision expressed in numbers. As Deniz Behç Delnoskara describes it, half of the country's top thousand students go into engineering, thirty percent into business, and only one to two percent into medicine. In Turkey the table runs almost in reverse: roughly thirty percent of the best students choose engineering while half of all students go to medicine. He calls this a deliberate risk; China sees the future in engineering and steers the best salaries and job opportunities toward that field. The British Council frames that table as part of a plan launched in 2023. That choice has a price behind it. According to People's Daily, Fudan University plans to cut humanities admissions from a thirty to forty percent band down to twenty percent, while converting engineering departments into six new innovation colleges spanning integrated circuits, intelligent robotics and advanced manufacturing. Caixin Global reports that more than 150 universities proposed closing long-standing majors such as marketing, international trade and automotive engineering for the 2025 academic year; in 2024 alone 1,428 undergraduate programs were discontinued, against just 57 in 2014. The humanities are being quietly retired while engineering is inflated.

Closing a major means dismissing its professors. Caixin Global describes how faculty at universities whose programs are dissolved must move to unrelated departments, teach general education or take administrative roles, with pay cuts, a fading professional identity and unclear promotion paths. Buildings and dormitories stay standing while the human supply behind them erodes in silence. The change in department counts is a table on paper; in practice it is the career shock of thousands of academics.

Unemployment and Mandatory Technology

The system's second pillar is not the distribution of majors but youth employment. SCMP reported in September 2026 that unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds reached 18.9 percent, the highest reading since the methodology was revised in 2023, up from 17.9 percent in July. Part of the rise is seasonal, but anxiety is growing because artificial intelligence is beginning to threaten entry-level roles. A record 12.7 million university graduates entered the job market this summer alone. The numbers move in the same direction: unemployment rises while majors shift toward engineering. The sixteen percent the speaker cites in the video has, by current data, climbed to 18.9 percent; the gap is most likely the distance between publication date and today. But the direction is the same: as youth unemployment climbs, universities are shifting from the humanities to engineering. He credits this to the authoritarian state structure, where a decision is made with a snap of the fingers and no year-long negotiation or resistance follows. Policy speed is both the system's most visible feature and its largest risk.

An artificial intelligence layer now sits on top of that. In a February 2026 report, NPR described an eleven-year-old student in Beijing demonstrating a small robot programmable with artificial intelligence, comparing the experience to the rovers sent to Mars and the Moon. CNA reported in March 2025 that schools would provide at least eight hours of AI classes a year, folding the subject into research, club activities and after-school services. Channel News Asia had reported in March 2025 that schools would provide at least eight hours of AI classes a year, and chinadaily (China Daily) then reported in October 2025 that Beijing had launched compulsory comprehensive AI education across more than 1,400 primary and secondary schools.

The mandatory hours are small, the target is not. Eight hours a year looks symbolic for a single term; the point is not the lesson but the declared intent, which is to make AI education universal across K-12. An eleven-year-old thinking about rovers on Mars while learning programming logic explains why department closures have moved so quickly: the workforce being formed is shaped at this stage, once.

How a Day Runs

Waking at six, then mandatory exercise the moment they arrive at school in thirty-five degree heat with ninety percent humidity. The speaker heard this from the students standing in front of him. A normal day holds eight to ten classes, and when the classes end the day does not: there are children doing homework on scooters on the street, a stack of projects and assignments that keeps growing. There is also a graduation condition few outside the system hear about, a physical fitness threshold. A set number of pull-ups and a set distance run within a set time are required for the diploma. Sleep is not an exam; it is a permission. Cameras sit in every classroom and teachers request them themselves. The logic the speaker relays is simple: a well-trained teacher needs the camera to prove the work, because if a problem arises the responsibility will not land on them. When a student sleeps during class, neither teachers nor students treat it as a problem; if they sleep, wake up and do the work more efficiently, it is not a problem. This is not discipline but an accountability mechanism.

Small details reveal the system's character. The toilets are spotless but there is no paper, no bidet and no automation; the water dispensers have two hot taps and one cold. The speaker's explanation is practical: hot water for instant noodles, plus a cultural habit of drinking warm water and a tea tradition. After a building is completed it stays sealed for a week so its energy can settle, and the campuses contain artificial feng shui arrangements with elevation, water and rock. The objects authoritarianism finds most comfortable are shared ones: umbrellas that belong to nobody, a cat on the school's budget.

The technical equipment of the classrooms is not accidental either. Walking into a high school classroom that looks like a university lecture hall, the speaker praises the soft seating first, then is surprised to see a traditional blackboard with a smart screen beside it. Asked about it, the teachers' answer is direct: they requested the blackboard themselves. A hall with soft chairs, a room with air conditioning and a smart screen sit side by side, which shows resources being allocated sensibly. Where the budget is sufficient, keeping the old alongside the new is a rational choice, not a luxury. Elite schools target everything, but they select middle school children early. The genius class at one of the best schools is made up not of high school students but of middle schoolers. The speaker says they are picked from villages as soon as their talent is noticed. The system wastes no time: the child arrives, proves the ability here, and is sent straight to university. These village children count among the most talented young people in the country.

Even the school's founding carries information. Seeing the number 1035 in the courtyard, the speaker first takes it for an enrollment count, then learns that the school was founded in 1035 and will celebrate its thousandth anniversary in 2035. This is not a record but a sign of institutional memory. A thousand-year-old school tells you that a state treats education as a continuity rather than a project. Nutrition is tied directly to the state's account. The speaker explains that roughly 600 yuan is deposited on the meal card each month while a single meal costs about 18 yuan; the card is used to pay, which makes the food only apparently free. There are four or five cafeterias, all of them in the buildings behind him. Satisfaction is measured with flowers, and the cook who looks happiest has the most flowers by her station. The cat budget, the water dispenser, the meal card: at every point where the system touches the student, there is a detail of state involvement.

The goal is to steer students toward university. According to the education policy the speaker describes, students split exactly in half between the academic track and vocational high school. The aim of vocational school is not to train master craftsmen but to train enough masters who are above average; the main energy goes into producing a sufficient number of people who clear that bar.

Return and Audit

The system's most discussed result is the return of students who went abroad. The speaker says only fourteen percent returned in 2001, while today that rate has risen to eighty percent. He notes that he could not verify the figure himself, and that a teacher he spoke with received a better offer abroad but stayed because nothing better had been promised there. What drives the return is not a passport or a visa but the existence of a career that local budgets can pay for.

The return is often not a voluntary choice but a persuasion campaign. A teacher at the school, an MIT graduate, lives here rather than in the United States. The reason is largely material and local: he came from a village, graduated, and may one day send a child from here to Oxford and bring that child back too. The speaker compares this to the genuinely patriotic people of the republic's early years, arguing that the same spark has formed in the minds of a large part of Chinese society today. The system's success lies here: it can bring back the people it raised.

The position of professors is part of the same picture. The speaker points out Mercedes and Audi cars in the parking lot and reads them as a sign that teaching salaries are good. Teachers are stratified: pay is higher at good schools, and a teacher whose student feedback is strong receives a bonus. Teachers hold a respected place in society, but they are also closely monitored, through unannounced inspections, announced inspections, student feedback and the measured success of their students. Respect and audit arrive in the same package.

The Question Left Open

The question at the end of the video is what the system rests on: does artificial intelligence combined with a shrinking population lead to a future in which society as a whole is not needed? The speaker says a belief is widespread in China that training a small slice of society to the highest level is enough to save the rest, and that as long as the very best are trained, the situation is not treated as a problem. The system sees unemployed youth as a tolerable side cost rather than a failure.

The speaker's own framing follows from this. Speaking about the competition ahead of Turkey, he says this generation will be the rivals of the future world and that Turkey too needs to do something to keep its place. He then stresses twice that his observations are subjective and that he may be mistaken. His final assessment is blunt: these developments are genuinely alarming. Because the subject here is education, the authoritarian regime and related topics are deliberately left aside for later and more critical videos. The cost of the system stays invisible. Everything the speaker describes comes from personal observation rather than a single official document; teacher conversations and a school tour shape the general judgment. The claim that the return rate rose from fourteen to eighty percent is not backed by a public statistic. By contrast, the department closures, the unemployment data and the mandatory AI education are verified: 1,428 undergraduate programs cut in 2024, youth unemployment at 18.9 percent, and at least eight hours of AI classes a year in more than 1,400 Beijing schools. What can be verified points to how sharp the system has become. The examination system also throws away a large share of what passes through it. Nearly ninety percent of the high school students here will become engineers, and the most talented young people in the country are gathered in this one place. Even a path that lets everyone overtake everyone through an exam eventually filters a portion of the system out. The speaker's elimination logic is plain: a student weak in mathematics is not someone who needs to study harder but someone who does not belong here, and there are others waiting behind the gate. Education operates as a machine that separates measurable progress from what cannot be accepted.