Achieving social equity in China: Why higher education can’t do it all
Xiaolan Jiang*
Since the Chinese government announced the policy of higher education expansion in 1999, the unprecedented rapid expansion has made China’s higher education develop by leaps and bounds from elite to mass higher education, and the total number of students in higher education ranks first in the world now. China’s higher education is largely managed by the central government and its system is a binary model: academic colleges/universities and more occupationally-oriented institutions. At present, there are 51.6% school leavers enrolling in higher education. In order to promote the development of China’s higher education and serve the needs of socialist modernization, the expansion of higher education enrollment in China continues.
There is no consensus on whether expanding access to higher education is good for promoting social mobility. Can the recent expansion of higher education in China help narrow the gap between different classes due to social origin? Can it play the role of social equaliser?
On the one hand, China’s university enrollment policy has expanded the absolute scale of higher education, which means that more students, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have the opportunity to access higher education. On the whole, this increase in enrollment has reduced inequality among young people. In this sense, higher education has become more inclusive.
On the other hand, the role of expansion in alleviating inequality is still limited. The Maximally Maintained Inequality (MMI) and the Essentially Maintained Inequality (EMI) hypotheses have been confirmed by many empirical studies as effective theoretical tools for the study of social stratification. Students from families with more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to maintain their advantages by obtaining more and higher quality education than the disadvantaged groups. Specifically, students from higher classes are more likely to go to universities and enter outstanding academic education. When students from disadvantaged backgrounds do enter the higher education system, they are often diverted to lower-status vocational education because of lower examination scores. As a result the inequality of educational achievement at school is likely to lead to the gap between their employment opportunities and income in the future because Education is a positional good. The scale of education can be seen as a layered cake, and the change in the size of the cake is unlikely to affect the structure of opportunities due to the amount of cultural capital owned by individuals of different classes being relatively fixed.
In recent empirical studies, Liu and Guo (2020) found that although the expansion of college enrollment increases the overall opportunities for higher education in urban and rural areas and the increase in access to higher education in rural areas is greater than that in urban areas, the expansion does not change the distribution pattern of higher education opportunities between urban and rural social strata. Besides, through the analysis of Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), Gong et al. (2021) pointed out that the expansion of university enrollment does not effectively solve the current problem of social class solidification in China or improve the fairness of society as a whole. Systematic inequalities among society still exist and are difficult to change. Therefore, China’s enrollment expansion policy does not introduce fair or equal access to the same type of higher education or labour market results.
One challenge is that inequality is complex and relatively stable. Failure of the expansion of higher education to effectively reduce inequality is not a reason to deny the value of expanding enrollment. While inequality is stable, an expanding system should be seen as increasingly inclusive because it extends a valuable commodity to a wider population while allowing a larger proportion of social classes to participate. The expansion of enrollment gives disadvantaged students access to higher education that would previously have been difficult or even inaccessible. The significance of such opportunities is not only reflected in the cultivation of human capital, enhancing the competitiveness of individuals in the job market, but is also a crucial way to achieve a wider purpose of education. Sen’s capability approach, for example, puts forward the role of education in promoting human development and social equity, including a series of concepts such as freedom, equality, agency, reflection, which aims to make individuals have real freedom or opportunities to choose and achieve what they value. On the whole, expanding the learning opportunities for men and women as individuals in the whole life process, China’s higher education enrollment expansion policy is still able to contribute to social justice.
The expansion of higher education is a powerful driving force to promote inclusion, which needs to be supported by other relevant policies and regulations, such as setting up student loans and scholarships, employment guidance for graduates, and establishing closer ties between China’s higher education sector and the labor market. Higher education is not the only driver to promote social mobility and improve the social class structure; rather, the common cause, pursuit of social equality, involves the efforts of the whole society. In other words, the equaliser function of education needs to be supported by social consensus.
*Xiaolan Jiang has just completed her study of Master’s degree (MSc Education–general pathway) at Moray House School of Education and Sport, The University of Edinburgh.
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