High School Attainment Rate in China as a Whole Is Low

choi

曲亦歌, 赶超美国？ 中国瓶颈是职业教育. RFA, Aug 13, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yat ... 08132019121536.html

, which is based on

Michael Schuman, To Conquer World, China Needs to Get Smarter. Bloomberg OPINION, Aug 12, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinio ... ugh-to-lift-economy

Note:
(a) The author, Michael Schuman, is a freelancer (not Bloomberg employee). The introduction about him in this opinion piece says he authored "The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia's Quest for Wealth" (HarperCollins, 2010) and "Confucius and the World He Created" (Basic Books, 2015).
(b) "The startling findings can be found in a recent paper by scholars from Stanford University and China’s Shaanxi Normal University. Analyzing Chinese 2015 census data, the authors determined that a mere 30% of the country’s workforce -- defined as all adults aged 25 to 64 -- had some high-school education."

Yu Bai, Siqi Zhang, Lei Wang, Ruirui Dang, Cody Abbey and Scott Rozelle, Past Successes and Future Challenges in Rural China's Human Capital. Journal of Contemporary China, 29: _ (online publication Mar 26, 2019).
https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.am ... s_human_capital.pdf

Quoting the research paper:

"using data from the 2015 Micro-Census for China [2015年全国1%人口抽样调查], the authors show that the low levels of education of China’s labour force is really a problem that has its roots in the past (in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s). In recent years (since 2000), China has been investing heavily in education as shown by the increasing the share of youth, including rural youth, attending high school"  Abstract at Web page 2.

"China's labour force human capital, in high school attainment rates, is lower than that of all other BRICS countries, aside from India for which data is unavailable). It is even below that of Indonesia (31%), a poor country that just recently graduated to become a lower middle-income economy. * * * Although the quality of human capital of China’s workforce is low on an international scale, this
does not mean that China does not recognise this problem." Web page 5. (The "high school attainment rates" is defined in caption of Table II at Web page 6: "Share of the labour force that has attained at least some high school in China and benchmark countries in 2014 (Percentage, by age cohort)." )

"The data show that the remaining problem of low high school attainment is concentrated in the rural areas of China. According to both data sources (MOE [Ministry of Education] and Micro-Census), virtually 100% of students with urban Hukou are attending high school. In fact, the rates of high school attainment of urban China are higher than those reported for the United States and Germany [footnote omitted]. The same is not true for students with rural Hukou. The MOE data show that 83% of rural 15–17 year olds attended high school, while the Micro-Census data report that number to be 77%. In simplest terms, the gap between urban and rural high school attainment rates means that for China to achieve universal high school attainment, effort must be targeted at getting the rest of China’s rural youth into high school."  Web page 8.

(c) "The statistics reveal that millions of Chinese workers may be unfit to support the very high-tech sectors Beijing is striving to develop."

When statistics means the science 统计学, the verb that follows is in singular form.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/statistics
Here, however, statistics is plural of a statistic
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/statistic
, so the verb is in plural form.
(d) "the authors of the study note that improvements in healthcare, nutrition and other aspects of child development are needed, especially in rural areas, to ensure the country's youth are able to learn once they get to high school."

youth (n):
"2: a young man  <he was attacked by a gang of youths>
        2.1: [treated as singular or plural] young people considered as a group  <middle-class youth have romanticized poverty>"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/youth