According to the latest data, China's public expenditure on education accounts for only 1.04% of the total world public expenditure on education, though China is responsible for 17.9% of the world’s officially registered students. China's expenditure of public education per capita is only 1/4 of the average expenditure in other developing countries. These figures suggest that education in China is faced with funding shortages.
By the end of 21st Century, China started to reform their higher education system and the cost to get higher education increased dramatically. As a result of the rising cost of further education, many well qualified children from poor families are unable to go to college.. If these take their admission to their universities, it will put their family into debt or even poverty.
Although the government has established a national grant system and there are all kinds of scholarships and grants to be funded by different organizations, it is still not sufficient to meet the actual needs of the huge number of poor students. To help alleviate the pressure, the Chinese Red Cross Foundation (CRCF) started the "Fraternity Scholarship Program" at the end of 2006, targeted at raising funds from the public and to create scholarships to help poor students study in colleges.
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