Educational involution refers to the phenomenon that a social or cultural model reaches a certain shape at a certain stage of development, and then stagnates or cannot be transformed into another advanced model.

Rice agriculture in Java

This concept was first used to study rice agriculture in Java. In colonial and post-colonial Java, agricultural production remained unchanged for a long time and never developed. Just repeating simple reproduction can't improve the unit per capita output value.

Internet buzzwords

Involution, an online buzzword, originally refers to a phenomenon that a cultural model cannot be stabilized or transformed into a new form after reaching a certain final form, and can only become more complicated internally.

University involution

Many college students use it to refer to irrational internal competition or "voluntary" competition. Now it refers to the phenomenon that peers compete for limited resources and make more efforts, which leads to the decline of individual "income-effort ratio"

Hard "inflation"

It can be seen as the "expansion" of efforts.