Various departments and universities in east China's Jiangsu province have recently issued statements promising that they will not lower admissions quotas allocated to local students.

This promise was made to assuage the concerns of anxious parents, following measures taken by the Ministry of Education to ensure higher college enrollment figures for less developed provinces.

The Ministry of Education recently released a new set of rules redistributing cross-provincial quotas for the national college entrance exam. Under the new policy, universities and colleges in more developed provinces with rich tertiary education resources, such as Jiangsu and Hubei, will have to take a larger number of students from less developed regions. This year, for example, universities in Hubei will enroll 40,000 students from less developed regions, while schools in Jiangsu will take 38,000.

But the directive triggered a public outcry from parents in the two provinces, and some even protested in front of local education bureaus last week, claiming that this will make it more difficult for their children to find a place at schools close to home.

Amid the outcry, the Department of Education of Jiangsu’s provincial government put out a public statement saying that the number of local students enrolled this year will not be less than that of previous years, despite the bump in student populations from other provinces.

Heads from the province's six key universities — Nanjing University, Southeast University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Soochow University and Nanjing Normal University — also promised at a press conference that their quotas for local students will not decrease.

Wang Zhuojun, Secretary of the Party Committee of Soochow University, said that overall enrollment this year will increase compared with last year. Liu Tiechuan, head of the education department of Hubei province, also pledged that the enrollment rate for local students at prestigious universities in the province will not drop.