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China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China's key challenge is whether it can become competitive enough in quasi-skilled and skilled sectors so that more technologically advanced industries and service sector firms eventually take the place of exiting low-wage factories. This study seeks to increase our understanding of high school education in China at a time when the nation is facing challenges in its development path. Using secondary statistics, we have found that educational access at the high school level is quite low, especially in poorer areas of rural China. We argue that the low level of access to high school education in China may be a problem resulting from high tuition and fees. We include empirical evidence about the tuition barrier argument by using a …