Chinese Higher Edu & Segregation
Chinese Higher Education and Segregation 2018.06.23.209
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Every year in June, families with children taking the College Entrance Examination are having a hard time. There are even news about unfortunate incidents. A kind-hearted friend sent me two video clips of students jumping off cliff to end their lives. Similar cases happen every year. I believe that most of these unfortunate cases happen to families at the bottom of the social ladder. Nowadays, class disparity poses a very serious problem to China, and the people at the bottom are having an extremely difficult time. In order to change their situation, they put too much hope in their children, and of course, they have also made great sacrifices for their children. In the last twenty years or so, especially in most rural areas, school education, from the basic level onwards, have put parents under great pressure. Since the schools are far from the villages, even the compulsory education demands too much from the families, such as payment for student dormitory, living expenses and transportation. Many parents, in order to take care of their children, even have to move away from their home villages and rent rooms near the school. The parents’ efforts are eventually converted into tremendous pressure that falls on the children. I know a student whose family was far from being the poorest. However, in order to pay for his high school education, his family reduced their living expenses to the minimum. When the results of the College Entrance Examination came out, the student knelt down to his mother as soon as he stepped in the door. Full of guilt, the son told the mother that he had not done well in the examination. It is hard to imagine how much torment the student went through on his way home.
Until today, small family is still the main guarantee of Chinese individual’s life. Children who need to pay for schooling can only rely on their parents, and likewise, parents can only rely on their children when they are old and weak. The people have sacrificed too much for the state, while the state is rarely accountable to the people. Most people at the bottom of the ladder certainly do not want their children to repeat their hard life. They are eager for their children to change their situation and earn a higher and more reliable income, both for the sake of their children and for their own sake. It is not that the parents are selfish, but that the state has failed in its duty.
The French scholar Pierre Bourdieu has a theory of capital reproduction through education. He argues that schools serve as one of the institutionalized mechanisms of capital reproduction. In other words, parents invest economic capital, in the form of money, in their children’s education, so that the children can acquire academic capital, in the form of academic qualifications. When the children graduate, they use their academic capital to earn money. In this way, from investment to earnings, and then, reinvestment to earnings, and the cycle goes on, and capital can be reproduced. This is also a capital conversion process, when money is converted into qualification and qualification is converted into money. That is, economic capital and academic capital are converted into each other. That the Chinese peasants’ endeavor to support their children in higher education regardless of its cost is a reproduction strategy that they have developed in a state of desperation. These parents want to transform their very limited capital into a new, more profitable form, such as paying for their children’s college education and acquiring academic capital, before they have become physically worn out. However, when rural people convert their economic capital into academic capital, the exchange rate is bound to be low. In particular, they are not likely to have access to sufficient information about university education. Many years ago, the enrolment rate of higher education institutions in most Chinese provinces was already over eighty percent; in such provinces as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Hebei and Inner Mongolia, it was over ninety percent. The identity of being a college student is no longer the marker of success. For many students from middle-class families, the competition is over admittance to elite and renowned institutions. However, it is not easy for many peasants to understand the relationships between the multiple categories of disciplines and institutions, nor do they fully comprehend the significance of the differences between the categories. This structural delay occurs because peasants are distanced from updated information by the mechanism of urban-rural segregation, leading to “allodoxia”. In other words, because you have no access to the necessary information, you may have errors of perception, or even become totally disoriented. Since the lower classes are distanced from the university, their choices may be based on “allodoxia”.
Especially in rural areas, peasants living in the closed rural environment are unfamiliar with school affairs. Teaching staff in rural schools tend to be poorly informed about the university curriculum and college graduates’ career prospects. Consequently, most rural students are more or less blind about choices of schools and subjects. Nevertheless, behind this blindness lies the solitary goal: an urge to uproot from their rural homes and therefore to be admitted to a school at any rate. For this reason, rural children try to be on the safe side by choosing institutions and majors of less prestige and less competition in relation to their peers from upper or middle-class families. As a result, the vast majority of them are admitted to institutions of lower academic quality and prestige. It is not that the children of the lower classes lack talents, not that they do not work hard, but that the environment in which they receive education is so much worse that, eventually, the current educational institutions will convert social inequality into a specifically educational inequality. Bourdieu, based on his study of French educational institutions, find that, first, different social classes have different educational chances; second, different sections and types of schools promise different chances of success. Working-class students are disadvantaged in both aspects. The disadvantages of these two aspects may combine into a mechanism of “deferred elimination” that excludes working-class students.
But before we talk about deferred elimination, let’s look at “self-elimination”. According to Bourdieu, children of working-class origin are more likely to “eliminate themselves” from the educational institutions by declining to enter it. This phenomenon is common in rural areas of China, where a large number of children do not want to go to school for a variety of reasons. However, Bourdieu also notes another form of elimination when he says, “Those who do not eliminate themselves at the moment of moving from one stage to another, are more likely to enter those establishments or sections from which there is least chance of entering the next level of education. Such institutions and school careers may entice them with the false pretenses of apparent homogeneity, only to ensnare them in a truncated educational destiny.” We may apply what Bourdieu says to China’s College Entrance Examination. We tend to believe that those who fail the College Entrance Examination are eliminated, while those who succeed in getting into college are not eliminated. This is actually an illusion. In fact, those who are not eliminated in the College Entrance Examination may enter those establishments or sections from which there is least opportunities for advancement. Such institutions of lower academic quality and lower prestige are traps, which lure students with the false pretenses of universities and colleges. Students who enter these low-quality institutions or second-rate programs do not feel the difference between them and their peers from upper or middle-class families. In fact, their process of higher education and their career prospects after graduation are different. Bourdieu compares such college entrance to “relegation”. That is, for children of the lower-classes who enter second- or third-rate institutions, entering college is just like being relegated or exiled. It is difficult for these students to avoid eventual elimination. Bourdieu calls it “deferred elimination”.
Deferred elimination may reduce the role of self-elimination at the end of the previous stage of schooling. When the students enter the next stage, “chances of entry” may be disguised as “chances of success”. What Bourdieu says may shed light on the case of China. Due to massification of higher education, almost anyone who enters senior middle school can go on to tertiary institution. This has lowered the percentage of elimination from college entrance examination. Many people regard success in the College Entrance Examination as a chance of success. In fact, it is only a chance of entry, and is still far from success. This may even be a “gentle style of elimination”. According to Bourdieu, this gentle style of elimination may be very cruel, because it is a “slow and costly” process.
To prepare for the College Entrance Examination, most rural students sacrifice extracurricular studies and have a limited knowledge structure. Sometimes they have to deliberately contain their ambition and reduce their ultimate goal to something “practical”. This impedes the realization of their potential. It seems that their illusion about higher education persists. even though the system drains financial resources from them, but fails to sufficiently convert their merits, such as diligence and perseverance, into deep insight and high competence on the employment market. When students have the opportunity to ascertain whether the university can give them what they have been expecting, they are in most cases already off the campus. Upon entry into the workforce, according to Bourdieu, inherited social capital or even economic capital, rather than the criteria for academic selection, begin to gain in force. To put it bluntly, it is money and social connections that count. Students from lower classes struggle desperately to go to college, precisely because they are short of social capital or economic capital. In the end, ironically, they find themselves back to the original place, where inherited social capital or economic capital recovers all their efficacy. Under such circumstances, even those who hold titles that “normally” would give them the right to a privileged occupation, yet who are not from the advantaged groups, cannot fully realize the value of their titles on the market. In October 2005, Qin Xu-hai, a 29-year-old doctoral student at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, committed suicide. He wrote in his suicide note: I am so useless. Academic learning turns out to be completely worthless. Only money, power, social relations and family background are held to be important. Now it is too difficult to become successful with decent talent. I tried to find a job, but no one would employ me. I was completely desperate for this world. From this unfortunate case, we can see that, when the government are expanding undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree enrollment irresponsibly, it is actually laying a big trap for the people. It would drain the people of all their wealth and time, before eliminating them.
The moment of graduation is the time when peasants test whether their reproduction strategies have been successful. At this point in time, they will find themselves facing the college graduate employment crisis. Some may even find that they have been ultimately excluded from the arena after, rather than before, they have exhausted all their resources in exchange for tertiary education qualifications. For rural students, this is deferred elimination; while for low-class families, this may lead to bankruptcy. Different from the “self-elimination” prior to admittance to higher education, deferred elimination, in most cases, lasts until after graduation, which consumes more of the peasants’ time and charges them higher prices. There is a popular saying: from “education improves life”, to “education leads to debt”. The cost of education, especially of higher education, has been the most important cause that impoverished many rural families.
The number of colleges graduates in 2017 was already close to eight million, while the United States had only three million graduates. At present, China’s secondary industry is still dominated by labor-intensive industries, while in China’s tertiary industry, the traditional service industry still accounts for a large proportion, which mainly accommodates off-farm workers. Besides, small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ a large population of rural college graduates, are overburdened with taxes and are struggling to survive. Occupations related to the livelihood and welfare of the rural population, such as basic education and medical care, could be a large market for college graduates, but the state rarely invests in them. Given the scale of college graduates and the existing economic mode, it is apparent that the current industrial structure is simply unable to accommodate college graduates of this magnitude. China’s current economic mode determines a large number of college students are bound to fall victim to deferred elimination. Rural students, who are admitted to the lower extreme of the higher education system, are the first to bear the brunt. Many rural students have to work as manual laborers and become “college-graduate-off-farm workers.” According to a statistic in twenty thirteen, the population of college-graduate-off-farm workers amounted to about 15 million.
Under urban-rural segregation, rural college students may find that they never get far from their original disadvantaged position, even though they struggle through the process from admittance to graduation and employment. What they have accomplished is a historic cycle with their status shifting from that of rural students to that of college-graduate-off-farm workers. One farmer put it this way, “Without higher education, the only difference for the children in the future is between being peasants or off-farm workers.” But the harsh reality tells us that, in many cases, even if rural children go to college, the only difference for them may be between being off-farm workers or college-graduate-off-farm workers.
In terms of tuition fees as a percentage of family income, the cost of higher education in China is definitely at the forefront of the world. There is a banter on the Internet, saying that, with a sack of money, you buy a sack of books; when you have sold this sack of books, you cannot buy a sack. As one rural student commented, “We never have had doubt about the importance of education. When we get on this track, we find that the cost is much, much more than the return.” As Bourdieu points out, a precondition for capital reproduction is that the convertibility of the different types of capital is guaranteed, and the reversibility of this capital conversion should also be objectively guaranteed. In other words, rural families invest in higher education to convert economic capital into academic capital with the hope that their children, with academic capital, can earn enough money in return for the investment, that is, to reconvert academic capital into economic capital. However, these two types of capital must be freely convertible with each other, just like freely convertible currencies. If this conversion is not guaranteed, or even, if it is a one-way conversion that is irreversible, if you invest your economic capital in education and your endeavor is not economically profitable, then, your investment would be meaningless. Currently in China, the reversibility of this capital conversion is hardly objectively guaranteed, particularly for families of the lower class. Therefore, higher education as an instrument of capital reproduction has failed to function effectively for many families of the lower class. Especially for the majority of the rural people, it is not possible simply counting on school education to improve one’s life. It may be too cruel to tell the truth, but that’s the way it is. For the people at the bottom of the ladder, it is important not to overemphasize the College Entrance Examination, for parents, not to put too much pressure on their children, and for students, not to care too much about the success or failure of one examination. Even if the College Entrance Examination is successful, it may only be the beginning of a process of elimination. We have to change the state system fundamentally, so that, from the very beginning, we receive early childhood education, basic education and higher education on an equal footing with others, regardless of whether we are rich or poor, urban or rural. Only in that way can we be as successful as other people.
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