The level of development of higher education (HE) is an important indicator to measure the development of the social economy and the civilization of a region or country. In this article, we compare the distribution of the freshmen of ethnic minorities (EMs) with the distribution of EMs over the population, based on a sample of 1 464 freshmen from 25 EMs of Yunnan Province in People's Republic of China (PRC). Although this analysis shows that access to HE is equal for some categories of EM students, it still shows that access to HE is harder for these minorities in comparison with freshmen from Han (major ethnic group comprising of 92 % of the Chinese population) families.