When Wang Fei was admitted to university, his parents hosted the entire village at a banquet. “Not many people here went to university and in our family I’m the only one,” he says.

But two years after his graduation with a logistics degree from Ningbo university, his family and neighbours in Xiaozhai, a village in the hilly landlocked province of Guizhou, one of the poorest corners of China, are in much less of a mood to celebrate 24-year-old Mr Wang, because his career is not living up to expectations. “When they look at me, many people think university is useless,” he says.

In a country where scholarship was once seen as the path of social mobility for anyone, especially the poorest, many now view higher education with scepticism.

“My brothers and my sister are as smart as I am, but there was no money, and then they preferred to get an industry job to going to university,” says Jiang Guoli, a 20-year-old English student from Leidayan, another poor Guizhou village.

Her generation has left home not to pursue more knowledge or training but for the quick money expected from jobs in the export manufacturing areas in coastal China.

The trend is the result of 15 years of higher education reforms that were intended to achieve the exact opposite.

From the late 1990s, Chinese universities, once elite institutions that only a tiny fraction of high school leavers could hope to enter, were encouraged to throw their doors open and recruit more students.

In 2010, 6.6m new students entered university, a record.

However, poor applicants from the countryside are in a much weaker position to grab these opportunities.

Village primary and high schools lack the qualified teachers and funds that urban schools have.

“The people they hire for our schools are mostly senior high school graduates who work as substitute teachers,” says Wu Bingfeng, a 22-year-old student of applied chemistry at Guizhou University. As a result, rural students often fall behind their city rivals in nationwide university entry exams and manage to enter only lower-ranking institutions.

According to a survey conducted in 2006, 3.5 times as many urban students as rural students graduated from senior high school. In technical school, the factor widens to 55.5 times, in university to 281.6 times and in postgraduate studies to 323 times.

The ratio of students with rural backgrounds entering top universities, such as Tsinghua or Peking, has dropped sharply since the reforms began.

“Expanded student recruitment by universities has increased chances to receive an education . .☺. but it has not automatically advanced the realisation of fair access to education,” said Yang Jianchao, a professor at Nanjing Normal University, in a paper last year.

While rural students on average have a smaller chance of obtaining a good university education, they pay as much as those from the city. When the Chinese government relaxed entry limits to the universities, it also allowed them to raise fees to finance the larger student numbers.

Average annual fees between Rmb4,000 ($634) and Rmb6,000 seem low compared with universities abroad. But that is still four to 10 times the annual household income in some of China’s poorest regions.

Although some comfort may be drawn from the fact that rural income is growing, such disparities have widened with China’s rapid urbanisation. The urban population now exceeds the rural one, as Beijing announced this week.

Jiang Guoli’s village of Leidayan indicates the standard of living in such areas. Home to 40 families, it clings to a slope high above a river gorge and is far away from paved roads, fixed-line telephone network and the nearest primary school. It takes more than four hours by bus plus a two-hour walk to reach it from Guiyang, the provincial capital.

Many families in provinces with rural populations at the bottom of China’s wealth ladder, have been driven into debt by their attempts to send their offspring to university, seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change one’s fate and escape the curse of poverty.

Mr Wang, the logistics graduate, is still optimistic that his education will pay off. But his situation is tough. Since graduating two years ago, he has tried life as a farmer in his home village, worked as a waiter in a Shanghai hotel and recently opened a computer shop in town.

He has also racked up Rmb40,000 in debt on top of Rmb20,000 in student loans he has yet to pay off.

Additional reporting by Chen Yuanni in Guizhou