At the beginning of the new academic year, the percentage of rural students in Peking University's undergraduate courses was 14 percent. It's true that the ratio of rural students in institutions of Peking University has increased by 2-3 percent over the past two years. But it's also true that the overall percentage is still low.

China has made rapid progress in higher education in recent years. Last year, 9.15 million students took the national college entrance examination, out of which about 6.89 million got admitted to colleges. A large-scale increase in the number of seats in universities and colleges has raised the college admission ratio to 75 percent nationwide, providing greater opportunities to students to get higher education.

Yet not everyone in the country gets equal opportunity to seek quality higher education. In fact, rural students find it even harder to get admitted to one of the top universities.

Liu Yunshan, a research scholar in education in Peking University, has collected the household registration (hukou) data of all the students admitted to Peking University from 1978 to 2005. According to Liu, the ratio of rural students enrolled in the university from 1978 to 1998 was about 30 percent. But the ratio began to decline from the mid-1990s and had dropped to about 10 percent a couple of years ago.

A similar trend has been seen in other key universities. Educationist Yang Dongping's research on equality in higher education shows that rural students' ratio in China's key universities has been declining since 1990s. For example, just 17 percent of the freshmen in Tsinghua University in 2010 were from rural areas - the figure was once 50 percent.

The drop in the percentage of students in universities from the countryside has raised public concern, especially because rural residents still form the majority in China despite rapid urbanization and the dramatic rise in urban population. According to the 2010 census, rural residents account for 50.32 percent of the country's population.