For the past few months, Du Wenhu, a consultant working in a vocational training center in Beijing, has been vexed by a problem that he can't solve. Du wonders whether he should send his daughter back to his hometown in east China's Shandong Province to attend high school there on her own, or let her continue her study in Beijing.

"No matter what I choose, it will be wrong," Du told ChinAfrica.

Although Du has lived and worked in Beijing for 15 years, he and his family are still registered in Shandong Province, where he was born and raised. Like many other migrant workers around the country, restrictions prevent Du from registering his household in the capital.

The problem he faces is that his daughter won't be allowed to take the national college entrance exams three years later if she attends a high school in Beijing, because her household registration is not tied there. But if Du sends her back to Shandong Province, the adolescent girl will have to separate from her family, studying and living all by herself for the next three years.

According to current regulations, students who are not registered locally are not allowed to take the national college entrance exam there, even though their family lives there, but have to return to the location of the household registration.

Facing dilemma

Du is not the only parent fed up with the dilemma of where to educate their children. According to statistics by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, there were about 478,000 migrant children of primary and middle school age in the capital in September 2011, when the school year starts. Most of them won't be allowed to take the college entrance exams in Beijing according to the current regulations.

The problem is not a regional, but a national one. China's 2011 population census showed that the migrant population nationwide had reached 260 million, up 81 percent from 2000. More than 9.97 million children of migrant workers attended primary and middle schools in places where their parents worked in 2009, said a news report by Xinhua News Agency.

The migrant parents face a terrible predicament. "I am afraid that my daughter will feel marginalized and have no sense of belonging if I send her back to my hometown [to study]. She even can't even speak the local dialect," Du told ChinAfrica. Moreover, textbooks and exam styles in Shandong are different from those in Beijing, and competition for enrollment by first-class universities is much fiercer.

In 2011, one of China's most prestigious universities, Tsinghua University, admitted 221 out of 76,500 Beijing-based examinees, but ust 75 out of Shandong's 550,000 examinees.

The national college entrance exam is considered to determine not only students' fate, but also the fate of their families. Du finally made a decision on his daughter's future, and will go back to his hometown with his daughter. "It is a hard decision. All of the achievements in my career gained during the past 15 years are in vain," Du said, "but I don't want to see the family separated and my daughter left behind in my hometown." 

Parents actually have another choice: forgetting about the national college entrance exam altogether and sending their children to attend universities overseas. Zhao Dong, a 27-year-old designer in a Beijing-based game company, cherishes such a hope. The high housing price in the metropolis didn't derail Zhao's ambition to seek his fortune in Beijing. His only worry was his child's future education, because he is not a permanent Beijing resident. Spending four years in a university in the United States will cost more than 1 million yuan ($158,100). "Although I have no child now, I have to plan for it and work hard from a young age so that I will be able to afford the future expense," Zhao told ChinAfrica.