The Death Of Social Mobility

His successors won't likely feel as grateful. Jobs like Koh's began disappearing in the late 1980s as China, Vietnam and other low-cost economies opened to investment. Since then the tigers have moved many manufacturing jobs offshore and refocused into areas like software engineering, high-tech services, finance and logistics. While that has created some new opportunities for college-trained bankers, stockbrokers, supply-chain managers and software engineers, there are fewer offerings for the majority of the labor market. In Hong Kong, where more than 600,000 factory jobs have disappeared since 1986, the service sector has become the main employment driver. But most openings pay rock-bottom wages for low-skilled positions offering few, if any, benefits; cleaners, salesclerks and security guards—the mainstay occupations for many Tin Shui Wai residents—pay just $400 a month to start. ''In the past, grass-roots people became entrepreneurs or factory bosses. They had hope," says Wong Hung, a social-work professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). ''Now it is almost impossible for the working class to have social mobility to the middle class."

The situation is exacerbated by a crisis in education. For starters, top schools (most government-subsidized public institutions) are filling their admissions rosters with the sons and daughters of the new elite, leaving applicants who don't make the grade to attend private schools that charge higher tuition, have inferior reputations and don't channel their graduates into coveted career jobs nearly as often. By the numbers, a third of professionals in South Korea send their scion to four-year universities, compared with just 7 percent of farmers and blue-collar workers. And in Taiwan, more than 60 percent of the incoming freshmen at National Taiwan University in 2004 matriculated from 10 elite high schools.

Educators say access is impartial, and it is true that most university admissions are test-based. But they also acknowledge a rich-poor disparity that has much to do with the out-of-class support zealous parents with means lavish on their stressed-out kids. That routinely includes fees for private tutors, cram schools, extracurricular activities and even summers at foreign-language camps abroad—vital aids for eventual entry into a top university. In Korea, the government says, spending on private education (the bulk of it extracurricular) is four times the OECD average. ''In the 1970s, most [Hong Kong] families were poor, but now those in the middle class contribute resources to buy musical instruments and sports equipment or pay for other academic training," says Wong from CUHK. ''And now many schools ask students to do projects that require things like digital cameras and Internet access. The education gap has become wider."

Students not ranked at the top of their classes in high school routinely turn to private universities or two-year junior colleges, using grants and loans to defray costs. (Singapore, with its preponderance of public technical institutes, polytechnics and universities, is the exception.) These institutions—the worst of which offer scant academic rigor—yield a smaller bang for the buck in terms of job prospects after graduation, but they've contributed most to an explosion of tertiary education over the past decade.

In Korea, eight in 10 high-school grads now advance to a two- or four-year college. In Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, the undergraduate rolls have tripled since 1996 to some 930,000 today, according to official statistics. In both countries, educators are now debating whether too many students attend university, and are looking at forced mergers or more rigid accreditation procedures by which the student population might be trimmed.

The problem: education doesn't always translate into better job prospects. Korean graduates of junior colleges or less-known provincial four-year colleges face enormous difficulties in finding even menial jobs. Early this year, for example, when a ward office in Busan sought to hire four street sweepers, more than half the 103 applicants had more than two years of college on their r?sum?s. And in a recent survey, 68 percent of Korean college students expressed a ''strong sense of crisis" over the tough job market they'll soon face. In Taiwan, meanwhile, of the 250,000 students who graduated this past June, about 105,000 remained unemployed at the end of September.