HSS: Implications of the College Expansion Policy for China's Social Stratification

In 1999, China implemented one of the most important educational policies in recent years - college enrollment expansion. Since then, overall college enrollment has dramatically increased, from 1,080,000 in 1998 to about 5.5 million in 2006, and 6.3 million in 2009. The extent to which the incremental quota for college enrollment has been equally allocated across subgroups of population and how much the overall inequality in access to college education has changed remain open questions. Based on data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) collected in 2005, 2006 and 2008, I review the history of higher education in China and examine the college enrollment rates by birth cohorts across gender, ethnicity, Hukou origin, family socioeconomic status, and political capital. I then conduct multivariate fixed effect analysis to see how the impact of these family and individual characteristics on college attendance vary before and after the college expansion policy. The findings support the Maximum Maintained Inequality (MMI) hypothesis that there is a persistence of intergenerational educational inequality, with elites managing to maintain their advantages by getting more education than the masses. Staggering disparities between those with urban and rural Hukou origin and across social classes remain after the reform. Findings also support the EMI hypothesis in that family resources become more important predictor over time, with those having greater resources attending higher quality colleges. The college expansion policy may have exacerbated the education inequality between social classes but reduced gender gap in recent years. I discuss reasons and implications for these changes.