Higher Education and Career Prospects in China [1st ed. 2020] 978-981-15-1509-5, 978-981-15-1510-1

This book explores how students in China vary in their understanding of careers upon arrival at college and how these in

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Higher Education and Career Prospects in China [1st ed. 2020]
 978-981-15-1509-5, 978-981-15-1510-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 1-19
Rural–Urban Inequality in Chinese Higher Education (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 21-39
WU, the Prestigious Path, and Initial Difference (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 41-63
Advantage Begets Advantage (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 65-83
Keep Searching, Keep Trying: Always Have Hope (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 85-105
Building My Résumé: Every Experience Counts (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 107-126
Forging My Own Path: Becoming the Person I Plan for Myself (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 127-145
Conclusion (Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen)....Pages 147-162
Back Matter ....Pages 163-169

Citation preview

Higher Education and Career Prospects in China Felicia F. Tian · Lin Chen

Higher Education and Career Prospects in China

Felicia F. Tian • Lin Chen

Higher Education and Career Prospects in China

Felicia F. Tian Fudan University Shanghai, China

Lin Chen Fudan University Shanghai, China

ISBN 978-981-15-1509-5    ISBN 978-981-15-1510-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1510-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To Huiqing Lin, Sijun Xu, and Qifan Wang

Foreword

For 40 years, I have taught ambitious, talented undergraduates at Yale College. Over these four decades, the Yale student body has become more diverse. Today, the percentage of students from elite private schools has declined and the percentage of those who are the first in their family to attend university has increased. Yet, the majority in each class still come from some of the country’s most academically strong and cosmopolitan schools and has parents who have spent heavily on extracurricular activities. To minimize the impact of such familial advantages on a student’s ability to thrive at Yale, the university goes beyond offering generous financial aid to develop programs and identify mentors for those whose high school was not nationally ranked or whose parents did not go beyond high school. Nevertheless, even as the leadership acknowledges that the cumulative advantages of family background create initial inequalities, they also firmly believe that all ambitious, bright students can flourish and that an elite Ivy School education will be an “equalizer.” Given the enormous differences in the resources and history of higher education in China and the US, readers may initially expect that the struggles and achievements of economically disadvantaged students in China would fundamentally differ from what I have observed at Yale. Chinese students enter an elite university on the basis of scores on a uniform examination of specific subjects, not through the evaluation of a dossier that may privilege extracurricular and athletic achievements above scores on a standardized test. Moreover, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) exams in the United State, unlike the Chinese university entrance exams, do not test mastery of specific course material; rather, they try to capture the far more vii

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amorphous and culturally shaped metric of intellectual capacity. In China, tuition is generally low enough that it does not dictate a student’s choice of school as in the US. The Chinese Ministry of Education, not the leadership of an individual college, supervises, sometimes even proscribes the curriculum. Finally, in China, a national system of household registration categorizes every citizen as either an urban or a rural resident, and in most provinces, that distinction channels high school students into separate and unequal school systems. Yet, when Felicia Tian and Lin Chen systematically probe the impact of cumulative advantage among a group of rural and urban born students who entered one of China’s most elite universities in the fall of 2014, their conclusions about the hard-earned maturity and selfawareness among these students will challenge prevailing assumption about the exceptionalism of both US and Chinese universities. Drawing on my experience of teaching undergraduates at another elite university in China, I would also stress that the experience of these students in Shanghai is not unique to this university or to this particular birth cohort. I first went to China as a sociological researcher in 1979, and for the next 40 years, questions about how the “accident of birth” shaped career have informed my research. In several projects, I specifically focused on estimating whether educational credentials independent of “all else” allowed an individual to surpass the social status of their parents or earn more than others from their generation. Most relevant for evaluating the generalizability of the case studies in Higher Education and Career Prospects in China, however, was my experience of teaching undergraduates at Peking University in 2008. I first went to China in 1979, as one of the first American sociologists allowed to do fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Between 1981 and 2006, I completed multiple training workshops and field projects, using focus groups, oral histories, and large-scale representative surveys. I also was lucky enough to work with several members of the first generation trained as sociologists after 1978, some of whom. such as Wang Feng and Yanjie Bian, later became my co-investigators and co-­authors. But it was only in 2008, when I spent a semester teaching at Peking University (PKU), that I fully immersed myself in teaching undergraduates. As expected, the PKU students closely resembled undergraduates at Yale in terms of their creativity, superb study skills, and high ambitions for their future careers. But, more unexpectedly, they also closely resembled their Yale peers in terms of their confusion and anxiety about how best to use their undergraduate years to identify and prepare for the successful careers that they, their par-

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ents, and their high school teachers all expected. And for those who came from the countryside or small county towns, and whose parents had not graduated from college, the anxiety was often palpable even to a visiting professor. Thus, I found Tian and Chen’s account of what they term “the emerging adult experience” among the rural born undergraduates resonated with what I had observed with my students at PKU. Among my students were also a small number of rural-born high achievers, who told me they were embarrassed by their poor English and whose worn sneakers and torn backpacks set them apart. Among the first- and second-year students in my lecture course, they often seemed to sit alone in the cafeteria and did not move in tandem with others. Yet, from their essays and from conversations in office hours, I heard the same kind of exploration and reflection that Tian and Chen found as they listened to the struggles of their rural-­ born students. Then from the more extended interaction with the seniors who took my research methods course, I witnessed the same hard-earned self-confidence about a professional future that would not be identical to that of urban, particularly Beijing, born classmates, but would fulfill their personal ambition. Like Tian and Chen, I also was impressed by how these resilient, high-achieving, rural-born students achieved a new relationship with their parents. Like many of the rural-born students profiled in this book, my rural-born undergraduates stressed that because their parents had never been to college, and usually had never left their home province, by their final year at PKU, they not only had fulfilled their parents dreams to send a child to university but they also occupied the role of an adult in their household. Their entry into PKU represented the same “bright promise of the entire family” that Tian and Chen flag, and by graduation, they had earned the right to disagree with their parents. Short conversations with a visiting faculty provide less substantial evidence than the extended interviews that Tian and Chen collected systematically over four years. But the parallels to my experience at PKU convinced me that the emphasis that Tian and Chen give to exploration and reflection is neither exceptional nor unique. As an academic monograph, Higher Education and Career Prospects in China makes a substantial contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about the validity of MMI and EMI (maximum maintained inequality and effectively maintained inequality) under conditions of massified higher education. It also complicates those debates by demonstrating the centrality and complexity of human agency. Thus, Tian and Chen’s conclusions will push

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colleagues who favor quantitative analysis to more fully specify their models. In addition, because the vivid case material so powerfully illustrates how school-based programs and interventions by mentors empower students to overcome initial disadvantage and thrive at the u ­ niversity, Higher Education and Career Prospects in China should be an essential resource for faculty and administrators in secondary schools and universities across the world. New Haven, CT, USA September 2019

Deborah Davis

Acknowledgments

This project began simultaneously with us becoming faculty members at Fudan University in 2014. We were like freshmen on our own. College was not the same as the time when we were undergraduates any more. It was more of a hustle-bustle than it used to be. Similar to all the freshmen, it took us a while to find the right position and to fit in as new faculty members. We thank all the students who shared their stories, feelings, and perspectives over the four years. We deeply appreciate that they gave us the opportunity to ride along with them, knowing about their ups and downs. To protect students’ anonymity and privacy, we grouped their similar experiences to form the stories presented in this book, in order to avoid any potentially identifiable information. The names in the book are all pseudonyms. This project is indebted to many people along the four-year period, including Professor Ke Xu, Xiaohui Zhao, Huaxian Wang, Weihua Zhang, and several student research assistants, Yunyu Yangzhang, Yilin Wu, Qiang Zhu, Jie Xing, Zhixuan Xiang, Yunru Tian, and Danni Liang. This project received financial supported from the Grant “The Career Planning of Contemporary Chinese College Students: Mechanisms and Policy Implications,” issued by The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League (19YB088). The data collection was also supported by the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University. We thank Palgrave Macmillan, especially Sara Crowley Vigneau and Connie Li, for all the editing support. Lin Chen is grateful to have Felicia as an indispensable collaborator on this project as well as a true ally since 2014. I look forward to more xi

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c­ ollaboration in the future. I also want to thank my mother, who is t­ urning 70 years old next year and always will be the most gentle person I know. So I want to dedicate this book to her. Felicia F. Tian feels very lucky to have Lin Chen as an awesome collaborator. I am sure we will have more exciting work from our collaboration in the future. I thank my mother, my husband, and my daughters, Yichen and Yiwei, who provide general support for my writing. Finally, we thank Emerald Publications for permission to use extracts of our analysis in the early stages of this project: Tian, F.  F., & Chen, L. (2018). Unequal at the College Door: Career Construction Among Freshmen at an Elite Chinese University. Interna­ tional Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 38(11/12), 1041–1056.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Family Background and the College-to-Work Transition  3 1.2 Cumulative Advantage  6 1.3 Forging One’s Own Path  9 1.4 Our Study 13 1.5 Overview of the Book 16 References 17 2 Rural–Urban Inequality in Chinese Higher Education 21 2.1 College Expansion and Changes in Employment 21 2.2 Rural–Urban Inequality Upon College Graduation 26 2.3 Rural–Urban Inequality Upon College Admission 29 2.4 Rural–Urban Inequality During College 33 2.5 Rural–Urban Inequality and Career Construction 35 References 36 3 WU, the Prestigious Path, and Initial Difference 41 3.1 WU 41 3.2 The Prestigious Path 44 3.3 Initial Differences in Career Awareness 49 3.4 How Initial Difference Accumulates During the Freshman Year 54 3.5 Initial Understandings of Career Matters 60 References 62 xiii

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4 Advantage Begets Advantage 65 4.1 The Path: Accumulated Advantages 66 4.2 The Path: “Fake It Till You Make It” 70 4.3 The Path: Difficult to Keep Up 75 4.4 Advantage Begets Advantage 82 5 Keep Searching, Keep Trying: Always Have Hope 85 5.1 Dan 85 5.2 Freshman Year: Feeling Perplexed and Purposeless 86 5.3 Sophomore Year: The Search for Meaning Continues 90 5.4 Junior Year: Understanding Trade-Offs 94 5.5 Senior Year: Still Wondering About the Future 98 5.6 Self-Determination for the Future103 References105 6 Building My Résumé: Every Experience Counts107 6.1 Yina107 6.2 Freshman Year: High School All Over Again108 6.3 Sophomore Year: Résumé Building113 6.4 Junior Year: Prepare for the Job Market117 6.5 Senior Year: Do Your Best or Be Yourself120 6.6 The Power of Looking Ahead123 References125 7 Forging My Own Path: Becoming the Person I Plan for Myself127 7.1 Fei127 7.2 Freshman Year: “I Am Different”128 7.3 Sophomore Year: Picking up Where She Left Off133 7.4 Junior Year: Reevaluating Her Choice137 7.5 Senior Year: “Defining My Own Path”140 7.6 The Meaning of Success in College144 References145

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8 Conclusion147 8.1 Reflections on College and the Construction on Careers149 8.2 Study Implications155 8.3 Summary159 References161 Appendix: Interview Guides163

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3

Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of incoming social science students “To-Do” list as a WU student Coefficients from logistic regression predicting the initial understanding of career and the initial understanding of job Reasons for participating in student organizations

14 46 51 58

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Rong was born in Shanghai. Both of his parents have bachelor’s degrees. His dad works as a senior director in a global top-500 company. His mother is a corporate lawyer. He attended the most prestigious high school in Shanghai and many of his classmates went abroad for college. Rong had gone to London for a semester as an exchange student during high school, but—not appreciating the food and weather in England—he decided to attend college in China. He chose to attend Wuhai University (WU) because it was his parents’ wish; they were alumni and it was close to home. Rong had been visiting WU since childhood, so the campus was familiar. Nor was the teaching style foreign to him. “My high school had the same teaching style as this university,” he said, “so it is not at all difficult for me to get used to study here. Now I have much more freedom to choose the courses that really interest me and can help me to launch a good career.” He came to the college with clear expectations about his future. He admired Steve Jobs and Elon Musk; he planned to follow their entrepreneurial path and open his own start-up. His parents encouraged him to do so. But his father reminded him that for a start-up to succeed, the most critical task is to sell the idea to venture capitalists early on. To get his feet wet in the world of finance, he decided to start out with a job in an investment bank. Fei is a classmate of Rong’s. She is from a deprived mountain village in northwestern China. Both of her parents are farmers; one of them attended high school but did not finish. Most of her peers from the village went to © The Author(s) 2020 F. F. Tian, L. Chen, Higher Education and Career Prospects in China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1510-1_1

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work in factories in Shenzhen or Guangzhou right after middle school. She is one of the very few who actually went to high school. All she did there was cram. She had to score high enough to get into a college; otherwise, she would have to follow her peers into a life of manual labor. She had never planned to go to WU because her score was not enough, but just before she took the college entrance examination, her high school was listed in WU’s Take-Off Plan, which lowered the test scores to recruit students from impoverished, rural areas. When the college offer arrived, her parents burst into tears. She was thrilled too but immediately realized that she did not even know how she would physically get to the school. There was no high-speed train near her village. The journey to Shanghai ended up taking her about 24 hours and three different trains. Arriving in the city, she had only the vaguest idea of what the college looked like. She was pretty sure a bright future awaited her because this was all parents and teachers told her. But after the first semester, Fei found that college seemed not to work the way she had expected. The teaching style at WU was a “culture shock” to her. “We are like trains,” she explained. “In high school, the teachers were like the train conductors, traveling along with us. But in college, the professors are like train dispatchers… It’s all up to us.” Rong and Fei come from very different backgrounds. How different will their career prospects be after they graduate? If this question were asked in China 30 years ago, the answer would have been simple: their future prospects would be equally bright. In the 1980s, when less than a quarter of Chinese high school graduates were able to attend college, and jobs were assigned by the state, a bachelor’s degree guaranteed a good job. Graduating with the same degree from the same university, Rong and Fei would have been given similar job placements. Yet, if the question is asked now, it is not easy to answer. More than three quarters of Chinese high school graduates now attend college, and though a bachelor’s degree still leads to a job for most graduates, it is not necessarily a good job. Though the unemployment rate for Chinese college graduates remains very low, a sizeable proportion cannot find work immediately and may end up in jobs that do not require a college education. Given the abundance of college students, employers no longer treat bachelor’s degrees like they used to; they now look more closely at the job candidates’ skills and capabilities. In this case, Rong and Fei’s future will not likely rest on their diplomas but rather on what they actually do in college. Their career chances are more likely to be related to their family

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backgrounds, their geographic origins, and the experience they gain in their studies. This book explores how differences in family background operate on college campuses and how they may lead to differences in the college-to-­ work transition among students. It documents the career development and emerging adulthood experience of 32 Chinese undergraduate students like Rong and Fei––students who are enrolled in an elite university but whose origins may be either urban or rural. This book shows that, although students rarely acknowledge it, college magnifies family background differences, giving urban students an initial “leg up” to succeed in college. But the book does not stop here. College also provides opportunities for students to reflect on their past in making their future. This book, in short, reveals the hidden role that family background plays in shaping the way college students construct their careers. Intertwined with college experience, family background can constrain, while an initial advantage begets further advantages; family background can also enable, which triggers reflection for students to create their own ways into the labor market and the real world.

1.1   Family Background and the College-to-Work Transition The expansion of higher education logically results in degree inflation. As colleges enroll more students, the supply of graduates increases, reducing the value of a bachelor’s degree. This is not specific to China; it occurs in many places around the world. In Dismissed by Degree, economists Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman of Harvard Business School argued that degree inflation traps college graduates in a labor market situation of underemployment (Fuller & Raman, 2017). In 2014, the Federal Research Bank of New York issued a report estimating that, on average, 30% of American college graduates are underemployed; the percentage has risen, particularly in the wake of the 2008 recession (Abel, Deitz, & Su, 2014). Burning Glass Technologies, an analytical software company that provides data and analysis of job growth and labor market trends, warns of the harsh realities faced by contemporary college students: “Employers are seeking a bachelor’s degree for jobs that formerly required less education, even when the actual skills required haven’t changed or when this makes the position harder to fill” (Burning Glass, 2014).

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The problem of degree inflation might appear to affect everyone equally, but it is made even worse by the existence of sharp differences in employment outcomes for people of different family backgrounds. College students from relatively wealthy families usually obtain the highest-paying jobs (Rivera, 2012). First-generation college graduates often suffer disproportionately from degree inflation. Analyzing the labor market outcomes of 2012 graduates from 15 public universities in Michigan, Aronson, Callahan, and Davis (2015) found that first-generation students did not fare as well as those with at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree did in terms of employment status, debt and income levels, and subjective assessments of job opportunities and financial stress. Though school-to-­ work transition is generally viewed as a challenge, first-generation college students see it as a “crisis” (Aronson, 2008). It is logical, then, to ask how this difference in the college-to-work transition is related to students’ family backgrounds. Career construction does not start after students arrive on campus. Rather, students arrive with varying amounts of prior knowledge about careers and explore their options further in college. They grow up in environments that shape their ideas and expectations about their future careers. They develop career expectations and knowledge from the experiences of parents and relatives, from the future portrayed by teachers, and from reading, movies, TV programs, and so on (Xiao, Newman, & Chu, 2016). This question about the implications of family background for the college-­to-work transition reminds us of the decades of debate on whether college is an equalizer or a gatekeeper. Subscribers to the equalizer view assume that college is a shelter from the outside world where the power of the past prevails. Once students are admitted to college and arrive on campus, they enter an environment full of new opportunities to explore. They live and interact with faculty and peers, far away from parents and neighbors. This is the belief college students—particularly first-generation students—generally hold. They imagine that college is salvation, an opportunity to say goodbye to the past, and hard work will enable them to achieve upward mobility (Silva & Snellman, 2018). Some social scientists have taken the equalizer view further, believing that college can narrow the socioeconomic gap among students that results from differences in family background. This subset of scholars believes that college not only washes students’ pasts away but also encourages students from disadvantaged families to keep up, as long as they fully participate in college activities, attending student clubs and interacting

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with faculty and peers (Tinto, 1987, 1988). Brand and Xie (2010) used two national representative samples and sophisticated statistical models to demonstrate that the students who are least likely to attend college are the ones who economically benefit from it the most. In How College Affects Students, Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini (1991) present a comprehensive review of the research literature on higher education from the 1970s to the 2000s. Their conclusion can be summed up in a single short sentence: Students who engage in college activities succeed. From their argument, the higher dropout rates among first-generation and minority college students in the United States are likely related to their lower levels of participation in extracurricular activities, fewer interactions with faculty and staff, and lower college satisfaction. Another set of scholars emphasizes an opposing set of findings that supports the view of college as a gatekeeper for perpetuating the power of the past (i.e., family background). These scholars emphasize that the college environment is not neutral but rather operates according to cultural rules, norms, and expectations that cultivate privilege (Bourdieu, 1989). According to this view, students from affluent families, raised to understand the code and conduct of the privileged, enjoy an initial advantage in college compared to other students for whom college culture is more difficult to assimilate (Massey, Charles, Lundy, & Fischer, 2003). This initial edge allows students from advantaged backgrounds to access college resources easier and earlier, as higher education distributes rewards according to prior achievements (Fischer, Mooney, Charles, & Massey, 2009; Stuber, 2012). In her 2014 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Anette Lareau (2015, p.  1) succinctly summarized the gatekeeper view: “The key issue was… the uneven rewards dominant institutions bestowed on different types of strategies.” In a recent award-winning book, Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) vividly showed that the American college fosters a “risky” partying culture. But this culture does not work for working-class students because they lack the necessary knowledge and resources. Yet, most working-class students still follow it because it looks cool and mainstream. As might be expected, however, it fails in the end. Taken too far, both views sound like myths. The equalizer view regards college as a neutral place where family background can be completely transcended. According to the equalizer myth, Rong and Fei would experience no difference in their career construction process, despite the sharp differences in their parents’ education, income, expectations about the

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future, and so on. The gatekeeper view, on the other hand, emphasizes that the differences derived from family origins are so powerful that they impede the underprivileged from deriving any benefit at all from college. Following the gatekeeper myth, Rong and Fei’s outcomes would be very different, given the differences in their families. This book dispels both myths by detailing the 32 students’ experiences of college and career construction. Contrary to the equalizer view, we found that the experiences of career construction described in the coming chapters were indeed shaped by family background. College did not eradicate the imprints of students’ pasts because a “prestigious path” (or “prestige career system”) (Binder, Davis, & Bloom, 2015) existed in the college that highlighted exploration but assumed students were clearer about what they wanted to do in the future. Incoming students who had a sense of their career goals—most often, students from urban areas—received a leg-up that gave them additional advantages in college. Meanwhile, contrary to the gatekeeper view, as we show in later chapters, we find that rural students neither completely yield to the past nor do they completely escape from it. For them, career construction is a life project that emerges from navigating and negotiating openings toward a better future, through making sense of the college experience and struggling against the gravitational pull of their family backgrounds. In short, this book explores and highlights two aspects of the way students construct their careers: one on cumulative advantage and the other on students’ reflections on how they can forge their own paths.

1.2   Cumulative Advantage College is a cumulative process. An initial advantage tends to accumulate as prior achievements are rewarded. This principle is called the “Matthew Effect,” alluding to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (13:12): “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even what he hath.” In the bestseller Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell described the Matthew Effect as a feedback loop that operates in many aspects of our society that make it so that people who have an early advantage will be able to be more successful. The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton (1968) to explain the skewed distribution of reputation in scientific communities where a small minority of scientists accumulated the most publications and awards. In a subsequent paper, Merton (1988) further suggests that reputation

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operates as “signals” that overvalue the work of established outstanding scientists relative to lesser-known, younger scientists. The reputation of these scientists cumulatively increases over time, concentrating resources and advantages among the few. The Matthew Effect has been widely noted in the field of education, particularly in college admissions (Delbanco, 2007). In Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, former Princeton president William Bowen and his colleagues scrutinized historical and contemporary data and concluded that the accumulation of small advantages and disadvantages from birth to age 18 can lead to massive differences in preparation by the time of college applications (Bowen, Kurzweil, & Tobin, 2005). In Kids Don’t Want to Fail, Angel L. Harris (2011) traced racial differences in attitudes toward schooling from grades 1 to 11 and similarly suggested that prior achievement and skills play a central role in the development of academic attitudes. Although cumulative advantage may appear to be an automatic process, it is, in fact, contingent on an “institutionalized bias in favor of precocity,” in Merton’s terms—the selection effect of early achievers (O’Rand, 2003). In the case of the scientific community, an initial group difference emerges based on ability, capacity, or simply by chance that identifies early achievers who “measure up to or conspicuously exceed the standards” (Merton, 1988, p. 616). This difference anchors the cumulative distribution of subsequent advantage. Compared to others, early achievers receive disproportionate rewards and resources that accelerate career success. Over time, a progressive bifurcation occurs, whereby early achievers accrue resources and reputations. Early achievers’ advantages continue to operate in college because college is not a neutral environment. It operates according to cultural rules, norms, and expectations that, in the West, usually align with those of the middle class (Lareau & Weininger, 2004). In the Chinese context, college culture aligns more closely with urban, rather than rural culture. In any context, elite colleges, such as the one studied in this book, have cultural and associated institutional logics related to resource allocation and procedures that cultivate privilege. The famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the metaphor of a football field to describe the social space where human interactions, transactions, and events occur (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). A football field has internal divisions, an external boundary, and specific rules. In addition to basic skills, novice players must learn the rules such as how their field

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positions dictate their movements and actions during the game. Their ability to use this knowledge determines how well they play. Similarly, in higher education, cultural logics and rules are determined by the middle class. Incoming students have to learn and play according to the rules. Elite colleges are deeply imbued with the rules of the privileged and work as incubators to cultivate privileged identities (Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Baltzell, 1989; Karabel, 2006). In the college-to-work transition, there is often a certain “prestigious path” admired by students. The career prestige system was identified by Binder et al. (2015) when they did fieldwork on Ivy League universities in the United States. While elite universities are supposed to open many career options, the majority of their students end up working, or at least strongly desire to work, in high-paying jobs in finance, investment banks, or high-tech firms. The prestige career system fuels such frenzy through peer influence and peer pressure. Such jobs are highly desirable because students watch their older peers fiercely compete for them during job fairs on campus. Through the visible competition, students develop a prestige ranking that classifies jobs into “prestigious”––elite, acceptable, and living up with the elite college degree––and others that are simply too “ordinary.” Such a job ranking is internalized by students even if they do not get those “prestigious” jobs (Binder et al.). The match between students’ career knowledge and the path to prestigious jobs ensures the early achiever’s advantage. In academic literature, this match is called “cultural capital,” referring to an individual’s educational qualifications, know-how, comportment, and taste (Lamont & Lareau, 1988). It is a system of social interaction cues that individuals use to regulate access and determine who is “one of us.” In higher education, cultural capital refers to the “knowledge of the informal and formal rules of institutions, strategies for gaining individualized accommodations, and the timing and requirements for implementing any request for accommodation” (Lareau, 2015, p. 21). Family upbringing determines that some students come to college with such cultural capital, while others do not. Students with cultural capital, whose knowledge and taste align with the college’s prestige career system, adapt to college life more quickly. The early achievers’ advantage is further reinforced by the structure of the college. Students may adapt to college life at a different pace, but college runs on a relatively rigid schedule. The key college transitions, including declaring a major, applying for graduate school, and, eventually, graduating, run on a fixed schedule and are very inflexible to students’

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individual needs or situations. Furthermore, as we have seen, college ­distributes rewards according to prior achievements. Grade point averages (GPA) are cumulative. Fellowships and scholarships are distributed according to students’ grades and previous awards. The résumé at graduation encapsulates the college experience in which “little moments build up to [key] transitions” (Lareau, 2015, p. 21). In the following chapters, we demonstrate that the initial understanding of career possibilities possessed by early achievers tends to cumulate, with prior advantage begetting further advantage. Early achievers, such as urban students like Rong, feel empowered, enjoy college life, and comfortably and smoothly build their careers. Others, especially those from rural areas, like Fei, feel constrained, frustrated, and even question whether they belong at Wuhai University.

1.3   Forging One’s Own Path Cumulative advantage reinforces the gatekeeper view. It is quite clear that Rong had an initial advantage over Fei. Rong knew what he wanted to do in the future; he was familiar with college rules and norms; his parents gave him insider knowledge for his future career plan. In contrast, Fei had little idea of what her future would bring, nor did her parents. After her freshman year, she continued to struggle with her academic studies. If cumulative advantage is the only process, one would expect Rong to be a high achiever, while Fei would struggle with the college-to-work transition after graduation. Yet, Fei did not turn out the way the gatekeeper view would suggest. From Fei’s story, one also shared by some of the other rural students, we revealed a second process: forging one’s own path, which highlights students’ reflections on career construction when the prestigious path does not fit their past. Reflection, according to Anthony Giddens, happens because social structure can both constrain and enable social action. It represents a deliberate, self-conscious social actor trying to taking control of their situation with the knowledge they derive from their past (Archer, 2003; Hitlin & Johnson, 2015). Reflection does not happen at an individual’s will but often results from a discrepancy between what he or she thinks will happen and what actually happens. As Harrison White puts it, “Seeking control is not some option of choice, it comes out of the way identities get triggered and keep rolling along as process. So basically, an identity comes along with its footing out of mismatch, by drawing on both observation and reflexive self-observation” (White, 2008, p. 9).

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Modern cognitive psychology offers a solid scientific foundation for reflection. Humans think in a dual-process way, consciously and automatically. A famous metaphor is a rider on the back of an elephant—the rider represents the conscious part and the elephant represents the automatic process (Haidt, 2001; Vaisey, 2009). Most of the time, when routine actions are needed for familiar situations, the elephant is in charge. It is only to deal with problematic situations or during life course transitions, when previous knowledge and practices no longer work, that the rider starts to think and make decisions. In this book, however, we do not treat reflection as a psychological trait, as positive psychologists define self-efficacy (Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013). Rather we consider it to be the process of understanding the new context and plans for the future. It is true that, when facing constraints in unfamiliar situations, individuals react differently. Their reactions relate, to a large extent, to individuals’ confidence about themselves and their expectations for the future (Bandura, 1986). This book, however, is not about students’ different reactions to problematic situations but, specifically, students’ decision-making processes around constructing their future careers. Reflection fits nicely into the school-to-work transition because the career development process is essentially a process of finding oneself. Donald E. Super, who developed perhaps one of the widely recognized life-span views of career development, defines career development as the process by which individuals integrate their self-concepts into careers as a means of self-expression (Super, 1990). It is a life-long process from childhood to retirement, through five chronological stages: Growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement. Each stage has specific tasks. At the growth stage (birth to age 15), individuals develop the capacity, attitudes, interests, and needs associated with self-concepts. At the exploratory stage (ages 15–24), individuals begin to narrow their career choices. During establishment (ages 25–44), individuals stabilize their career paths through work experience. During maintenance (ages 45–64), individuals adjust and improve their working positions and situations. Finally, at the disengagement stage (ages 65 and above), individuals reduce their work output, prepare for retirement, and eventually retire. According to Super, college students are in the exploration stage. At this stage, they grasp the essential meaning of a career, identify an a­ ppropriate career path, and adapt their career choices to the realities of the labor market. This stage has three milestones (Super, 1990). The first one is crystal-

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

lization, in which students identify and define careers by formulating their interests, skills, and values and by pursuing career goals that align with their understandings. The next is specification, in which students design tentative and specific career choices. The final milestone is implementation, in which students begin to actualize career choices by building strategic skills through training and job opportunities. This three-step process is not necessarily linear; it can sometimes be reciprocal, with ups and downs. Some students may progress quickly, while others may fall behind. This career exploration process is a social process of continuous interaction between the self and the environment. For an individual to attach his or her self to a certain career, he or she needs to postulate the self into a vocation and then apply it to an available occupation (Savickas, 2005). This involves negotiating self-fulfillment, social approval, and adjustment to the labor market. The individual needs to assess his or her abilities, interests, and goals, understand the labor market, and learn about the educational and skill requirements for specific careers. To make the career dream reasonable, negotiation and compromises often occur. For college students, college is one major environment for career construction. Students’ interactions with faculty, staff, peers, and mentors at college influences their career explorations. These interactions often happen in organized activities, inside and outside the classroom. Curricular activities are important because they enable students to gain human capital, develop noncognitive skills, and acquire specific career knowledge, all of which are valuable to employers. Academic performance (e.g., GPA) signals competence. Class projects and presentations help to develop noncognitive skills such as communication, time management, and teamwork. Curricular activities also provide opportunities for students to interact with faculty and to learn about specific careers and the work world in general. Social and other extracurricular activities in college are also crucial. On average, curricular activities occupy only 15–20 hours each week, and this number diminishes as college progresses (Stuber, 2012). Most career exploration occurs outside the classroom. Extracurricular activities provide opportunities for college students to extend social networks, gain knowledge about labor markets, and build work connections. Students form career identities and personal tastes, such as physical appearance, speech, manners, and sports preferences, through their interactions with peers (Kaufman & Gabler, 2004; Stevens, 2007; Zweigenhaft, 1993). This personal taste signals to employers which candidates fit the company culture (Rivera, 2012).

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It is the interaction between family upbringing and the college e­ xperience that triggers reflection in the career exploration and construction process. Family background defines the self and the interpretation of the college experience. Students come to college with certain career orientations and expectations. Their family backgrounds shape most of these orientations and expectations and also serve as a basis for interpretations of and interactions with the college experience. Take extracurricular activities as an example. In her study of college students’ participation in extracurricular activities, Stuber (2012) finds stark differences among students from different kinds of family backgrounds. Middle-class students tend to arrive at college with an orientation toward sociality. Their parents and friends encouraged outgoing behavior and taught them techniques for meeting people. In contrast, students from less affluent families were not as comfortable with campus sociability. First-generation students, in particular, viewed socializing as a distraction from academics, which they understood to be the main purpose of college. Think of Rong and Fei again. Given Rong’s situation at the beginning of college, he would have a planned-out college life and a smooth college-­ to-­work transition. He probably thought very little about the meaning of college for the future because his family upbringing in many aspects resembled the college experience. College was a given. In contrast, the mismatch between Fei’s past and the college experience triggered her to think, question, reflect, and search, which could allow her to jump out of the cycle of cumulative advantage and, fundamentally, the prestigious path on campus, to forge her own path. Thus, for Rong, career construction in college was meticulously planned, but for Fei, the process was reflective and transcendent. In the second half of the book, three stories, based on different groups of students’ experiences of career construction, represent the reflection process as it bounces back and forth between the college experience and the family experience. The “cultural shock” of college breeds reflection. When students search or plan for the future career, their past experience is an important reference for making sense of the current situation, a starting point for them to find out who they are, what they want to be, and what kind of future they want to make for themselves. Career exploration thus becomes a search for their own way into the real world, a process of navigating and negotiating to reconcile the past with the present in making their own future.

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1.4   Our Study Our study followed a cohort of undergraduate students in the social sciences for four years at Wuhai University, a flagship university in the city of Shanghai, located on the east coast of China. WU is a highly selective, elite university that attracts talents who want to study the arts and sciences (see Chap. 3). According to the Ministry of Education regulations, all Chinese public universities have to recruit students based on the standard test scores in the college entrance examinations. In the recruitment process, WU does not have information on students’ family backgrounds. It can only base its admissions decisions on test score rankings. Usually, the top 10% of each province can be admitted to WU. As it is highly selective, the school administrators, as well as the public, view WU students to be at a similar level in talent and other cognitive capabilities. WU admits students into five broad major categories: the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, business and economics, and medicine. At the end of their freshman year, students are expected to choose one major within each category. The social sciences include six majors—sociology, social work, anthropology, political science, international relations, and public administration. If students are not satisfied with any majors in the broad major category, they can also apply to change majors at the end of the freshman year. This study focused on students in the social sciences because, compared to other categories of majors, such as business and economics, the career prospects in social science is relatively vague. On the one hand, it means that the possibility for future careers is fairly open. On the other hand, it means that students need to figure out what they want to do and build the skills for it. The career prospects of social science majors are not very clear for students from the beginning. In the freshman year, we heard them saying things like, “I heard that majors are not related to your jobs.” And “It doesn’t matter [which major I choose], because if I can actually build some serious marketability in college, that is enough.” This study focused on students in the Social Science Foundation also because it has one of the largest pools of rural students on the WU campus. To address inequality in college admissions, the Ministry of Education in China gives public universities special quotas to admit rural students from the most impoverished areas. At WU, this initiative is called the Take-off Plan. Students who are eligible for the Plan need to have both parents registered in rural households (hukou) in villages that are classified as “poor” by the Office of the Leading Group on Poverty Alleviation and

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the Development of the State Council. They also need to have been enrolled in township high schools for three consecutive years. Once these criteria are met, WU admits them with lower test scores than ordinary students. Because the social sciences have a relatively low mathematics requirement and aim to cultivate students’ social responsibilities, WU orientates most of the students admitted through the Plan to the social sciences in the first year. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 32 students, of whom 20 students were from urban areas and 12 were from rural areas, starting from 2014. We used the household registration status in the student registers to classify students into urban and rural families. Given the places where participating students took the college entrance examination, we classified urban students by city administrative ranking, with 10 students from municipalities (zhi xia shi) or provincial capital cities and 10 students from towns or other cities. Table 1.1 lists the demographic and socioeconomic status of the students from the three groups, those from capital cities, those from non-capital towns, and those from rural areas. There was a sharp difference in socioeconomic characteristics between urban and rural families. Compared to rural students, urban students tend to be the only child within the family and to have parents with more years of education and often a college degree. There was also a difference Table 1.1  Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of incoming social science students Rural

Male Only child Father’s years of education Mother’s years of education Father has a college degree Mother has a college degree Sample size

39.02% 31.71% 4.30

Urban (total)

25.15% 78.53%

3.73

Towns and other cities

Municipalities and provincial capital cities

23.23% 68.37% 8.11

28.13% 93.85% 9.47

7.36

8.81

5%

71.6%

63.27%

84.38%



60%

52.08%

71.88%

40

162

98

64

1 INTRODUCTION 

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between the two subgroups with urban origins. The parents’ years of ­education and their probability of having a college degree was higher for students from municipalities or provincial capital cities than for students from towns or other cities. We piloted a survey with all the students in the social sciences two weeks into matriculation. Class counselors distributed hard copies of the survey in a class meeting. The initial purpose of the survey was not about career exploration but about young adults’ perceptions of markers of adulthood. We listed around 20 markers of adulthood and asked students to rank the importance of each item. Among these markers of adulthood, we listed “full-time employment” and “long-term career” as two separate markers. The survey results showed a noticeable difference among students in considering the importance of “long-term career” for adulthood (see Chap. 3). A discrepancy in career awareness among students stood out, and this called for further exploration. To understand this discrepancy, we invited about a third of the students to write self-reflections on their college life at the end of the first semester. To avoid bias, we gave no specific guidelines but asked them to write their experiences and feelings like diary entries. On average, students wrote about a page and a half, or about 1500 words in Chinese. The contents of students’ self-reflection primarily concentrated on academic and social adaptation, interpersonal relationships, and future plans. Ideas about their future careers showed significant variations. Some students did not mention thoughts about careers at all, some already had concerns, some had clear ideas, and some even had action plans. The differences indicated variation by family background. The difference in the written self-­ reflections, together with the results of the survey, reinforces the perception that family upbringing plays an important role in the initial college students’ understanding of career issues. We then decided to explore the career and emerging adulthood process through which such initial differences evolve in college years. Over the course of our 32 participants’ four years of college, we conducted five rounds of interviews. The first, second, and third rounds of interviews took place at the beginning of the second semester of the ­freshman, sophomore, and junior years. Because the senior year is more intensively focused on careers, we conducted two rounds of interviews that year, one at the end of the first semester and the other at two months before commencement. In these interviews, we focused on how students conceptualized their future careers, how they had prepared for them, and

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how they had prepared for their future life in general. In addition to career and adulthood questions, we also asked about their academic and extracurricular experience, relationships with peers, parents, and faculty members, their romantic relationships, and any other aspects of college they were willing to share. Each interview lasted between 50 and 90 minutes. In total, there were over 150 interviews.

1.5   Overview of the Book The six chapters that follow further contextualize the interplay between family background and the college experience with regard to career construction and exploration adulthood over the four years. Chapter 2 provides the Chinese contexts for the relationship between family background and higher education. It traces the history of labor market development and college expansion to contextualize contemporary concerns about the college-to-work transition. It also shows how the rural–urban difference, a fundamental inequality in terms of family background, manifests itself at the entry and exit of higher education and the Chinese government policies trying to address it. Chapter 3 describes the settings at WU that enable cumulative advantage to operate. It describes WU, the prestigious path there, and the initial differences in the career understandings of urban and rural students when they first arrive on campus. Chapter 4 describes the gatekeeping process or cumulative advantage. By comparing and contrasting three typical career exploration stories of students who can be best-labeled early achievers, followers, and misfits. We analyzed striking similarities among students in how they value the prestigious path. The initial difference in career understanding is reinforced through interactions with WU’s prestigious path, generating a process in which advantage begets advantage. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 describe the reflection process or forging one’s own path. For rural students who struggled with the prestigious path, career exploration becomes a reflection on reconciling discrepancies between the new college experience and their family upbringings. The process of reflection as a means of finding one’s future is not smooth, as these three chapters show. Rather, it is confusing, frustrating, and does not always lead to an answer. Chapter 5 presents a story of confusion but also a persistent search for one’s path. Chapter 6 presents a story of distancing oneself from the prestigious path and of mapping out an alternative route.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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The story in Chap. 7 is one of questioning the legitimacy of the ­prestigious path and of finding the self. In all of these stories, the painful process of forging one’s own path enables these students to finally escape the trap of cumulative advantage. Combined with a conclusion, in Chap. 8 and an appendix, these six chapters represent a contribution to the sociology of inequality in higher education by studying the career exploration process of urban and rural students as they work to reconcile college experience with family background. The stories we see here suggest that college can be either an equalizer or a gatekeeper. Three factors—college experience, family upbringing, and students’ own reflections—generate two contradictory processes in which family background can both constrain and enable students’ exploration of careers in college.

References Abel, J. R., Deitz, R., & Su, Y. (2014). Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs? Current Issues on Economics and Finance, 20(1), 1–8. Archer, M. S. (2003). Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, E. A., & Hamilton, L. T. (2013). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aronson, P. (2008). The Markers and Meanings of Growing Up: Contemporary Young Women’s Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood. Gender & Society, 22(1), 56–82. Aronson, P., Callahan, T., & Davis, T. (2015). The Transition from College to Work during the Great Recession: Employment, Financial, and Identity Challenges. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(9), 1097–1118. Baltzell, E. D. (1989). Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson. Binder, A. J., Davis, D. B., & Bloom, N. (2015). Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire “Prestigious” Jobs. Sociology of Education, 89(1), 20–39. Bourdieu, P. (1989). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bowen, W. G., Kurzweil, M. A., & Tobin, E. M. (2005). Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

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Brand, J. E., & Xie, Y. (2010). Who Benefits Most from College? Evidence for Negative Selection in Heterogeneous Economic Returns to Higher Education. American Sociological Review, 75(2), 273–302. Burning Glass. (2014). Moving the Goalposts: How the Demand for a Bachelor’s Degree Reshaping the Workforce. Retrieved from https://www.burning-glass. com/research-project/credentials-gap/ Delbanco, A. (2007). Scandals of Higher Education. New York Review of Books, 54(5), 42–46. Fischer, M. J., Mooney, M. A., Charles, C. Z., & Massey, D. S. (2009). Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fuller, J., & Raman, M. (2017, October). Dismissed by Degrees: How Degree Inflation Is Undermining U.S. Competitiveness and Hurting America’s Middle Class. Published by Accenture, Grads of Life, Harvard Business School Haidt, J. (2001). The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychology Science, 108(4), 814–834. Harris, A. L. (2011). Kids Don’t Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-­ White Achievement Gap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hitlin, S., & Johnson, M. K. (2015). Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead. American Journal of Sociology, 120(5), 1429–1472. Karabel, J. (2006). The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton: Mariner Books. Kaufman, J., & Gabler, J. (2004). Cultural Capital and the Extracurricular Activities of Girls and Boys in the College Attainment Process. Poetics, 32(2), 145–168. Lamont, M., & Lareau, A. (1988). Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments. Sociological Theory, 6(3), 153–168. Lareau, A. (2015). Cultural Knowledge and Social Inequality. American Sociological Review, 80(1), 1–27. Lareau, A., & Weininger, E. B. (2004). Cultural Capital in Educational Research: A Critical Assessment. In D. L. Swartz & V. L. Zolberg (Eds.), After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (pp. 105–144). New York: Springer. Massey, D. S., Charles, C. Z., Lundy, G. F., & Fischer, M. J. (2003). The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science. Science, 159, 56–63. Merton, R. K. (1988). The Matthew Effect in Science, II: Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property. Isis, 79, 606–623. O’Rand, A. (2003). Cumulative Advantage Theory in Aging Research. Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 22, 14–30.

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Pascarella, E. T., & Terenzini, P. T. (1991). How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty years of Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms. American Sociological Review, 2012(77), 6. Savickas, M. L. (2005). The Theory and Practice of Career Construction. In S. D. Brown & R.  W. Lent (Eds.), Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2013). Navigating into the Future or Driven by the Past. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 110–141. Silva, J.  M., & Snellman, K. (2018). Salvation of Safety Net? Converging Aspirations and Diverging Narratives of College Among Working- and Middle-­ Class Young Adults. Social Forces, 97(3), 559–582. Stevens, M. L. (2007). Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stuber, J. M. (2012). Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education. Lexington, KY: Lexington Books. Super, D. E. (1990). A Life-Span, Life-Space Approach to Career Development. In D.  Brown & L.  Brooks (Eds.), Career Choice and Development: Applying Contemporary Approaches to Practice (2nd ed., pp. 197–261). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Tinto, V. (1987). Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tinto, V. (1988). Stages of Student Departure: Reflections on the Longitudinal Character of Student Leaving. Journal of Higher Education, 59(4), 438–455. Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: a Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715. White, H. (2008). Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Xiao, J., Newman, B. M., & Chu, B.-s. (2016). Career Preparation of High School Students: A Multi-Country Study. Youth & Society, 50, 818–840. Zweigenhaft, R. (1993). Prep School and Public School Graduates of Harvard: A Longitudinal Study of the Accumulation of Social and Cultural Capital. Journal of Higher Education, 64(2), 211–225.

CHAPTER 2

Rural–Urban Inequality in Chinese Higher Education

This chapter describes the context of rural–urban inequality in Chinese higher education. The shift from a centralized job-assignment system to an open labor market has meant that college graduates need to take responsibility for their own school-to-work transition. Rural–urban inequality exists upon graduation, upon college admission, and during college years.

2.1   College Expansion and Changes in Employment The concern about college students’ school-to-work transition in China is a relatively new phenomenon. Between the 1980s and 1990s, college students typically had jobs waiting for them upon graduation. Jobs were distributed through a centralized job-assignment system. Although the period of economic reform had been initiated in the 1980s, self-­employment and jobs in the private sector were just starting to emerge. Most technical and professional jobs continued to be distributed via the centralized job-assignment system (Bramall, 2009). In contrast to the college-to-work transition in the labor market setting in which students apply to employers for jobs and employers send job offers to students, in the job-assignment system, the state matched students with employers. The specific procedure for job assignments ran as follows (Bian, 1994; Rui, 1988). Each year, the central and local governments planned labor quotas and distributed those quotas to the labor bureaus of different ­government sectors. These government sectors then redistributed these © The Author(s) 2020 F. F. Tian, L. Chen, Higher Education and Career Prospects in China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1510-1_2

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quotas to state-owned enterprises (or work units, danwei) under their ­jurisdiction. After receiving the labor quotas, the state-owned enterprises sent recruitment requests to colleges specifying the expected numbers of graduates and the qualifications that were needed. Each state-owned enterprise could send requests to multiple colleges and each college could receive requests from multiple state-owned enterprises. The administrations of each college then made announcements of job openings to graduates, but there were no open, direct application procedures. Instead, each administration conducted screening and recommended the names of desirable applicants to the state-owned enterprises. In most cases, the state-owned enterprises accepted these applicants and reported them to a labor bureau for approval. Once these applicants were approved, which also happened in most cases, the labor bureaus sent employment notices to the colleges. The employment notices often only indicated the places of employment (i.e., to which state-owned enterprises) but not particular occupations or positions. Not until graduates checked in at the designated enterprise were they assigned the specific jobs or positions. As the economic reform progressed, the job-assignment system has been seen as limiting freedom of choice on both students’ and employers’ sides. Moreover, only state-owned enterprises could hire college students via the job-assignment system. If the system was not relaxed, the private sector would have no way to attract college students even if they offered better pay. The first sign of a relaxation of this system happened in January 1988, when Prime Minister Li Peng introduced “two-way selection” (shuang xiang xue ze) to grant both students and employers more choice (Mei, 1989). “Employers and students should be given opportunities to mutually select each other,” Peng announced. “A ‘two-way selection’ system in which students select employers and employers select the best students should be gradually established.” In 1993, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council jointly issued an Outline for Education Reform and Development in China, demanding that China’s higher education system be adapted to the new socialist market economy. This outline indicated the termination of the job-assignment system for college students. As Grace O. M. Lee (2001, p. 12) has remarked, “Labor reforms… do confirm the ideological acceptance of labor as a commodity… The individual, instead of the state, owns his or her labor power, and can enter into employment contracts.” The centralized job-assignment system was fully abolished in the early 2000s.

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23

The freedom of choice comes with a cost, however. As finding and keeping jobs becomes college graduates’ own responsibilities, they also must face the risk of unemployment and job mismatch on their own. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this was not a problem because the demand for college graduates was huge and the supply was small. China’s economy has grown at an annual pace of more than 7%. The private sector has been expanding rapidly. The emerging private sector, including companies with private, foreign, and joint-venture ownership, provides new job opportunities with better monetary rewards and higher returns to education (Hauser & Xie, 2005; Nee, 1996; Verhoeven, Jansen, & Dessens, 2005). The change in employment statistics is revealing. In 1978, less than 1% of the urban labor force was employed in the private sector (Davis, 1990), but in 2000, the figure had risen 59.5%, and by 2017 to 84.7% (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2018a). It was the expansion of access to higher education in the 2000s, however, that made college-to-work transition a real concern. In response to rapid economic growth and the high demand for high-skilled labor, the Chinese government decided to expand college recruitment (Yang, 2007). In June 1999, at the third National Education Conference, the State Council announced a plan for college expansion. The policy was in effect for seven years. Under it, the number of college students grew from 1.6 million in 1999 to 5.46 million in 2006 (Li, 2010). The expansion was halted in 2006. In May 2006, in the Executive Meeting of the State Council, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao suggested that the rapid growth in college recruitment needed to be curbed. Shortly thereafter, the Ministry of Education announced that the annual growth of the number of college students should be capped at 5% per year. The number of college students then continued to grow at roughly that annual percentage. The Ministry of Education announced that in 2014, the number of incoming college students had reached 6.98 million, with 37.5% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 22  in college (this was the gross college enrollment rate) (Ministry of Education of China, 2015). According to Martin Trow, a leading scholar of higher education, when the gross college enrollment rate pass 15%, college education has shifted from being a system of education for the elite to a system of mass education (Trow, 1973). Chinese higher education, after 15 years of expansion between 1999 and 2014, is now well within the category of mass education. In mass higher education, a college diploma is not an effective representation of skills but functions rather as a basic requirement for technical

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and professional jobs. Armstrong Williams, in his blog at The Hill, has concluded that the purpose of mass higher education is not to cultivate elites but to “impart knowledge to children that they need to effectively function as a member of society” and “to provide a basis for employers to choose the most appropriate employees.” (Williams, 2011). In order to find a good job, college students need more than a college diploma. They also need the right set of cognitive as well as noncognitive skills in communication, time management, teamwork, problem-solving, and so forth (Gardner & Lambert, 1993; Mortimer & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). According to the 2018 Chinese 4-Year College Graduates’ Employment Annual Report (2018 Report hereinafter) (Chinese Occupation Skills, 2018), 7.8% of college graduates failed to find jobs upon graduation in 2017. This figure is more than three times higher than the unemployment rate of college graduates in the United States in 2017 (2.3% on average) (United States Department of Labor, 2018). This figure is also considerably higher than China’s national overall unemployment rate of 3.9% (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2018a). This means that Chinese college graduates—who were long considered the most competitive among all educational groups—are actually disadvantaged in the labor market. College graduates are also proportionately at a disadvantage in terms of salary. The average salary of college graduates does not match the years of education they put in. The 2018 Report shows the starting monthly salary of college graduates in 2017 was ¥4317 (about USD 629), which was slightly higher than their average monthly starting salary in 2016 (¥3988, or USD 581) and 2015 (¥3726, or USD 543). While it is a good sign that the starting salary has increased over the years, this average starting salary represents a relatively low return to education. National Bureau of Statistics of China has reported that in the first quarter of 2018, the monthly salary of migrant workers was ¥4226 (about USD 616) (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2018b). That is, compared to farmers who generally have only a junior high school education or less, a college degree or seven years more education represents only a 2% gain in salary. Even for students who graduate from colleges listed by Project 211 (i.e., the top-­100 universities ranked by the Ministry of Education), the starting monthly salary is ¥5691 (about USD 829). Thus, the achievement of passing a highly competitive college entrance examination and completing seven more years of education is rewarded with a salary gain of about 35%. This shows

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that college expansion has devalued credentials universally, even for graduates of elite universities (Li, 2012). Beyond salaries, credential devaluation is also revealed in college graduates’ low levels of job satisfaction and high levels of turnover. The 2018 Report shows that fewer than 50% of college graduates work in the jobs they were expecting to get, and only about 66% work in jobs that are related to their majors. These figures are fairly similar for graduates both from Project 211-listed universities and from those that are not on that list, which suggests a universal pattern of low job relevance among all college graduates. After six months of employment, 33% were not satisfied with their current job, particularly among those working in private sector and non-profit organizations. “Low income” and “limited career development” were among the top reasons for their lack of satisfaction. On average, 33% of college graduates voluntarily leave their first job within six months of graduation. Given these poor results, the employment of college students is a matter of ongoing concern to the government. One government response has been to promote the development of small and medium-sized companies, as they account for more than 80% of urban employment. As early as 2009, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao listed college graduates along with laid-­ off workers from state-owned enterprises and migrant workers as his major labor market concerns, with the graduates being the top priority. Later the same year, partly to address the prime minister’s concerns, the State Council published Some Opinions on Further Promoting the Development of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. In 2017, Prime Minister Li Keqiang emphasized employment as one of the Chinese government’s central goals, asserting that “China is fully capable of expanding employment and will not allow large-scale unemployment.” In August 2018, the State Council organized the first meeting on the National Leading Group for Promoting the Development of Small- and Medium-sized Firms to create friendly finance and legal environments for these firms’ further development and to encourage the employment of degree holders. Despite these government efforts, the apparent slowdown of the current Chinese economy could worsen the college-to-work transition. Internet-based companies, which were one of the favorite target industries of college graduates (according to the 2018 Report), have started to cut back on recruitment. Alibaba, the largest internet company in China, slashed new hires by 85% during the 2015 Fall Campus Job Fair (Xi, 2015). Many positions in production, marketing, and operations were

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eliminated without notice. Interns were also dismissed. Start-up companies, another popular outlet admired by college students, have also closed in large numbers in recent years (Mobile and Internet, 2016). Government jobs (i.e., civil servants) have now become the number-one target of many recent college graduates. Stability, rather than innovation and accomplishment, is the primary career goal of recent college graduates (Zhang & Jiang, 2017).

2.2   Rural–Urban Inequality Upon College Graduation Differences in family background, particularly the rural–urban divide between families, permeates the college-to-work transition in China. Numerous scholars have argued that the rural–urban gap is a fundamental cause of social inequality in China today, for several reasons. The first reason is that it is institutional. Each Chinese citizen is classified in the household registration system (hukou), as either agricultural (i.e., rural) or non-agricultural (i.e., urban). Hukou status generates inequality because it is closely linked to Chinese people’s access to education and employment opportunities, health care, and other government-funded benefits (Chan, 2013; Lu & Wang, 2013; Tian, 2003; Wu & Treiman, 2004). Urban hukou holders typically have better welfare benefits than rural hukou holders, but the difference has been shrinking in recent years (Chan & Buckingham, 2008). The second reason is economic. Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard universities, compared the factors contributing to income inequality in the United States and China. For the United States, they found that individual-level and family-level factors, such as race/ethnicity and family structure, are determinative of income inequality. In China, on the other hand, individual-level and family-level determinants play a relatively minor role; it is the rural–urban difference that plays a much larger role (Xie & Zhou, 2014). Within urban areas in China, a city’s administrative ranking also determines individuals’ life chances and social mobility. Because China’s economic development is government-driven, this ranking determines the distribution of resources to a great extent. According to the 2018 City Ranking (phb123.com, 2018), among 19 first-tier cities, 13 are ­municipalities or provincial capitals; among 11 second-tier cities, seven are provincial capital cities. Moreover, most Chinese universities are located in municipalities or provincial capitals. Among 116 universities included in

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the Project 211 list, 104 universities, or roughly 90%, are located in municipalities or provincial capital cities. Rural–urban inequality in China also affects labor market outcomes among college graduates. In March 2014 the People’s Daily reported that there was no difference between rural and urban students in terms of the overall employment rate (Zhao, 2014). A growing number of studies have shown, however, that rural students do not fare as well as urban students in several aspects of the job search process and in labor market outcomes. For example, after controlling for individual-level and college-level factors, the probability of finding jobs upon graduation for college graduates who hold urban hukou is 62% higher than the probability for college students who hold rural hukou (Liu & Hu, 2008). Using a representative survey of college students from 17 universities (in the class of 2013), Xiao and colleagues undertook a comprehensive comparison of the experiences of urban and rural students during the job search process and in labor market outcomes (Xiao, 2014; Xiao & Zhang, 2015). They found that, compared to urban students, rural students experienced greater family pressure to find jobs, had less desire to go to graduate school, were less confident about their capabilities, and made more of a job search effort, sending out more résumés and doing more interviews (Xiao, 2014; Xiao & Zhang, 2015). Their efforts, however, did not pay off very well. Rural students were more likely than urban students to get jobs in the private sector that had long work hours and limited opportunities for promotion; they were less likely to find government jobs, had lower starting salaries, and were less satisfied with their first jobs (Xiao, 2014; Xiao & Zhang, 2015). These differences remained when the authors controlled for students’ grades, college majors, and university rankings. Rural students were also less likely than urban students to become Chinese Communist Party members during college, which helps to explain their relative lack of success at obtaining government jobs (Li, 2016). Some scholars attribute rural students’ labor market disadvantages to institutional barriers related to hukou. Hukou status is actually not a major concern for employers in screening for applicants, but it is a major factor for college students when job hunting (Zeng, 2004). According to the hukou policy, students are allowed to transfer hukou to the cities where their universities are located during study and are asked to return hukou to their places of origin after they enter the labor market unless they find jobs in the city. Because Chinese universities are spatially clustered in municipalities and provincial capital cities, the limitation of hukou transfer made the labor

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market in municipalities and provincial capital cities highly competitive while the labor market in other places remained unattractive, Lai and Tian (2005) have called this a form of “labor market institutional segmentation.” This hukou barrier is particularly harmful for rural students because it makes it difficult for them to find jobs in their places of origin. Such labor market segmentation caused by hukou barriers has both intensified and relaxed as city governments have diversified hukou entry policy in opposite directions (Chan, 2013). On the one hand, municipalities and provincial capitals, where most universities are located, have reinforced hukou entry barriers and have thus made it more difficult for rural college graduates to enter local labor markets. Other cities, on the other hand, have relaxed hukou entry barriers to attract more college graduates to work there. Institutional barriers related to hukou thus continue to contribute, though unevenly, to rural–urban inequality, in the college-to-work transition. Rural–urban inequality means more than institutional barriers; it also entails disparities in family resources. Rural students tend to have parents without college educations and lower family income; their parents tend to work as either farmers or manual labors and have fewer friends with professional and government jobs. The parents of urban students, on the other hand, tend to have completed four years of college, work in professional and government jobs, and have friends who also work in professional and government jobs. Parents who work in professional and government jobs are in a position to provide their children with more detailed information about job openings. They may offer useful advice for job interviews because they know what employers are looking for. They may also provide actual job opportunities because their friends tend to also work in these areas. In other words, family resources give urban students an edge over rural students in the job search process. It is, therefore, not surprising that urban students are more confident and efficient than rural students in the job search process since their parents can offer actual help. Rural students must rely on themselves alone. F. Xiao and Zhang (2015) suggest that rural students in China are most likely to learn of job openings from campus job fairs, the internet, or other formal channels, while urban students often hear job openings from parents, relatives, or other informal channels. During the job search process, urban students often receive help from their family networks but rural students’ family networks are less likely to be activated, and even when activated, are less helpful. Rural–urban inequality also manifests in students’ career-related prospects and skills. Career counselors point out that good academic

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­ erformance is only a small component of a successful college-to-work p transition. Two other aspects are more important. One is to match one’s future aspirations with the realities of the labor market. Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, published an article in one of the top journals in career planning entitled “It’s a Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard, Hard World.” Gardner was sending a strong message to college career counselors to try to line up students’ career expectations with market realities (Gardner & Lambert, 1993). Because rural students are less familiar with the labor market, they are often overconfident about labor market realities that may hamper the job search process (Xiao, 2014). The second aspect of a successful school-­to-­work transition is a set of career-related social skills. Communication, time management, teamwork, problem-solving, and even leisure habits are important qualities employers seek from job applicants in professional jobs (Rivera, 2012; Wendlant & Rochlen, 2008). Rural students may compete with urban students in academic performance but are relatively lacking in such social skills (Yue & Ding, 2004). A widespread blog entitled “It is hard to have a noble son from a humble family” (han men zai nan chu gui zi),1 published pseudonymously, succinctly summarized the family and personal differences that generate rural–urban inequality in China in the college-to-work transition. It tells the story of the career outcomes of a group of students from an elite university doing internships in one of the leading Chinese banks. Interns from rural families are less favored by managers than their urban counterparts are because they lack appropriate social skills such as communication protocols and teamwork. They are hardworking, but this quality is not impressive to the banking industry because their jobs focus on dealing with customers. Urban students tend to be inculcated in those social skills by their family upbringing; and even if they lack the appropriate skills, their families can still provide a safety net.

2.3   Rural–Urban Inequality Upon College Admission This rural–urban gap in the college-to-work transition is striking given that college admissions already represent a sifting process. Although Chinese universities base recruitment predominately on test scores, urban students are still admitted in disproportionately greater numbers than rural students. Using the 2005 1% mini-census, C. Li (2010) has reported

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that the enrollment ratio of urban-to-rural students is three to one. That is, if there are four students in a college dorm room, on average, it would be one rural student and three urban roommates. Moreover, rural students tend to enroll in universities with lower school rankings and in majors of less market value. F. Xiao (2014) estimated that rural students have a 13.1% lower probability than urban students of enrolling in top universities, those in the Project 211 list, for example. Z. Xie and Wang (2005) compared enrollment rates between rural and urban students in a range of majors. They found that the rural–urban gap is smallest in the social and natural sciences but largest in majors with the highest starting salaries such as accounting, software engineering, and telecommunications engineering. College expansion has not undermined but, instead, has further reinforced, urban students’ advantages. In January 2009, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made the following statement in Xinhua News: There is a phenomenon that deserves our attention. In the past when we attended college, rural youth accounted for around 80%, or even higher. Now it is different. The proportion of rural students [attending college] has dropped. This is one thing I always think about. With socioeconomic development, farmers’ income has gradually increased, so rural children should have had more chances to go to school, but their numbers have declined in senior vocational schools or universities.

Mr. Wen’s statement has been confirmed by empirical research. Guo (2008) reported that the urban-to-rural ratio in college enrollment had increased by 33.6%. Using a different sample, C. Li (2010) estimated that the urban-to-rural ratio in the probability of enrolling in four-year college had increased by 75% during the period of college expansion: before it, the urban-to-rural ratio in college enrollment was 3.6 to one; after the expansion, the ratio had grown to 6.3 to 1. Let’s take the school dorm example again. Before college expansion, it would have been one rural student to three urban students in a four-person college dorm. After college expansion, one is unlikely to see a rural student in each college dorm. One rural student to every two rooms is more likely. The shrinking of opportunities for rural students despite college expansion seems to be counterintuitive, but the same phenomenon has occurred in many countries that have made the shift from elite education to mass education. In their 1993 book Persistent Inequality, Yossi Shavit and

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­ as-­Peter Blossfeld organized by far the most comprehensive cross-national H comparison of the relationship between family background and educational achievement during periods of expansion in higher education. The book included quantitative analysis from 13 countries across cultural origins and levels of economic and social development, including Western capitalist countries of the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden, non-Western capitalist countries of Japan, former socialist countries of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. All these countries exhibit a fairly consistent pattern. In all countries, except Sweden and the Netherlands, the relationship between family background and educational attainment does not decline, and, in some cases, it is reinforced during college expansion (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). The persistent association between family background and educational attainment is called “maximized maintained inequality” (Raftery & Hout, 1993). College expansion does not result in the equalization of educational opportunities because well-off families are disproportionately able to reap the benefits of expanding opportunities. Through college expansion, their higher levels of economic, educational, and social resources can work to their children’s educational advantage. Xuan’an Xiong, the top scorer in the 2017 Beijing College Entrance Examination (liberal arts section), recounted how he succeeded2: Children in rural areas are finding it more and more difficult to get into good schools. Students from middle-class families like me have no worries about food and clothing. Our parents are also intellectuals and were born in big cities like Beijing. We therefore enjoy unique, abundant educational resources that youth in other places or in the countryside do not. This means that in my studies, I can take many more shortcuts than they can… Nowadays, top scorers [in college entrance examinations] are all like this. Generally speaking, we are from families that are good and powerful… My parents are diplomats, and, well, they have provided a very good family atmosphere for me since childhood… My study habits and character building are subtle and natural… I have had a solid foundation at every step, and so I will succeed in the end.

The rural–urban gap may further widen as more Chinese elite universities launch the Independent Freshman Admission Program (IFAP) to individualize admission beyond simply test scores. IFAP has important implications for the rural–urban gap because, when a large proportion of young adults can go to college, school rankings become the sifting ­channel

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for elites. IFAP varies from one university to another, but some common features include adding additional scores to high school graduates who have excellence in arts, sciences, or sports, or delegating some portion of test scores to face-to-face interviews. X. Wu and Li (2019) have examined the factors that determine whether students can be admitted through IFAP programs into three Chinese elite universities (the Beijing, Tsinghua, and Renmin universities). They reveal that, on average, about a quarter of freshmen in these three universities were admitted through IFAP. Urban students are 13.8% more likely than rural students to be admitted through IFAP. The IFAP program, which aims to optimize admission beyond test scores, thus gives urban students an additional edge over rural students. The persistent and even expanding rural–urban gap in college admissions suggests that Chinese college students should be more of a homogeneous group when they finally enter college. But are rural and urban students similar in terms of career preparation when they enter college? Research generally overlooks students’ pre-college disparities in career preparation. Given their relative disadvantages in college admissions, rural college students are a very selective group who show outstanding excellence in intelligence and perseverance. Yet, career preparation needs more than intelligence and hard work; it is a constructive process that places one’s past experience into future career development (Savickas, 2005). Readings and teachings about careers, having career-related conversations with parents, friends, and teachers, and pre-college work experience shapes students’ career preparation in high school (Xiao, Newman, & Chu, 2016). Some research on Chinese high schools implies that rural students are not the same as urban students in terms of their understanding of future careers. Other than the family environment, high school is the context where students gain the most knowledge about future careers. Yet most Chinese high school students do not have a career plan because college admission tends to be treated as a final goal rather than an avenue toward a future career (we go into further depth about this in Chap. 3). This is particularly the case for rural high schools. Compared to their urban counterparts, most rural high schools (usually located in towns) are underfinanced and have fewer teachers and facilities, including classrooms, libraries, music rooms, computer rooms, and the like (Wu & Huang, 2016). In the book Educating the Chinese Individual: Life in a Rural Boarding School, Mette Halskov Hansen (2015) described high school studies as having one sole purpose: to score high enough in the college entrance examinations:

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[Chinese high school students] had no idea about what they themselves were interested in studying or which occupation they would like to have, because they found it useless even to consider these issues before knowing the results of their final examination… [They] complained a great deal about the continuous pressure of examinations, which mainly tested their individual abilities to memorize large parts of the curriculum. At the same times, students had been accustomed to this practice since primary school, and they did not envision any realistic or even clearly desirable alternative to it. They found it to be relatively fair… Students… were accustomed to continual reminders that they need to ‘study hard’ (haohao xuexi) and to strive for academic success, which would presumably get them more secure jobs and better incomes, lives, and social status than their parents had. (pp. 82, 130, 134)

Rural students thus do not give much thought to their future beyond the general idea of obtaining a university diploma in order to find a better job than their relatives or friends could. They generally believe that once they enter prestigious universities, their perseverance will automatically lead to academic and then career success.

2.4   Rural–Urban Inequality During College The aforementioned statistics, studies, and policies have exposed the extent and nature of rural–urban inequality upon college admissions and the college-to-work transition in China. Another question naturally follows: How might this rural–urban gap affect life inside the college gates? There is actually relatively little known about the effects of the rural–urban gap inside college gates. Judging by the small amount of research that has been done, we can assume that a student’s family background affects a student’s pre-college ideas about college and the post-college future, and that this initial understanding, in turn, affects college life (Tian & Chen, 2018). But how does this gap influence the launching of students’ careers when it comes time to graduate? The goal of the majority of the existing research is to try to determine whether Chinese colleges are equalizers or gatekeepers. The two views essentially predict two distinct patterns. If college is an equalizer, we would expect rural–urban inequality at the moment of college admissions to have lessened by the time of graduation. If college is a gatekeeper, we would expect the opposite: rural–urban inequality at the time of college admissions would be continued, or even enlarged, by the time of graduation. The Beijing College Students Panel Survey, a longitudinal i­ nstrument

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that followed a sample of college students who studied in Beijing for four years starting in 2006 or 2008 (i.e., the class of 2010 or the class of 2012), makes it possible to address this question. A few studies have used this data, notably Xu (2017) and Zhu (2018), with mixed results. Xu (2017)’s finding supports the equalizer perspective. She compares scores on self-efficacy and self-esteem, two noncognitive abilities that are essential in career development, between poorer students (most from rural areas) and other students in the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. Her findings show that the growth rate for self-efficacy and self-­ esteem is higher for poorer students than for students who are better off. In the freshman year, the poorer students scored significantly lower than better-off students in both self-efficacy and self-esteem. In the sophomore years, this gap persisted but became smaller. In the junior year, the self-­ esteem scores of poorer and better-off students continued to be different, but the gap in the self-efficacy scores disappeared. In the senior year, the difference in self-esteem scores also disappeared. Thus, while there is a gap in noncognitive abilities at the beginning of college, it is eradicated by the end. While Xu (2017) paints a promising picture of college as a channel for upward mobility, recent public views tend to regard higher education more as a gatekeeper. A few years ago, the personal story of Keyu Jin, now a professor at the London School of Economics, spread widely on the internet and triggered a public debate on social origin and success. One comment in particular resonated with many college graduates: “It is not that those who seem to be not that successful are less intelligent of do not work as hard. It is that although they put in the same amount of effort (or even more), some portion of it needs to be used to ‘overcome’ their social origins.”3 This claim was confirmed in Zhu (2018)’s study, which reveals a more complicated pattern of change that for the most part supports the gatekeeper perspective. He compares the changes in GPA, in scores on the National College English Test (CET-4 and CET-64), and in whether students take on leadership roles. On average, rural students worked harder, spent more time studying, and had a lower probability of missing classes. Their hard work translates to better grades but not to English test scores, nor to becoming student leaders. In these later two aspects, urban students showed statistically significant advantages over rural students (Zhu, 2018).

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2.5   Rural–Urban Inequality and Career Construction College expansion since 1999 has transformed college in China from an elite system to one of mass education. In the context of mass education, a bachelor’s degree signals no more than eligibility for professional and government jobs. College graduates face degree devaluation, lower returns to education, high levels of job mismatch, and low levels of job satisfaction. What is most important is the underlying pattern of rural–urban inequality. Compared to urban students, rural students, in general, have to work harder to find a search, have lower starting salaries, and higher levels of job mismatch. Institutional, familial, and individual differences all contribute to the rural–urban gap. Rural students are also at a disadvantage in college admissions. They suffer from more selective requirements in terms of intelligence and perseverance than their urban counterparts. Nevertheless, rural students continue to have less understanding and knowledge about future careers after beginning college, which can further aggravate their disadvantages in developing career goals, accumulating career-related resources, and ultimately constructing a successful career path. The chapter reviewed existing evidence on the implications for universities of students’ career construction during college. Some studies have found that college is an equalizer in terms of closing the gap between rural and urban inequality, while others see college as a gatekeeper. Little is known, however, in China and elsewhere, about how this rural–urban gap in career development evolves during the college years. In the chapters that follow, this book traces the career construction process of a group of students from an elite university in urban China for four years to explore their career construction process and how the rural–urban gap evolves during it.

Notes 1. https://www.jianshu.com/p/b4312b75ada7 2. http://gaokao.eol.cn/news/201706/t20170629_1535780.shtml. Accessed July 2, 2019. 3. https://www.douban.com/note/493809087/. Accessed by July 3, 2019. 4. College English Test-4 (CET-4) Test-6 (CET-6), Chinese national English proficiency tests, administered by the Ministry of Education. CET-4 is the entry level of English for job market in China and CET-6 is more advanced.

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https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/unemployment-rate-2-1-percent-forcollege-grads-4-3-percent-for-high-school-grads-in-april-2018.htm Verhoeven, W. J., Jansen, W., & Dessens, J. (2005). Income Attainment during Transformation Processes – A Meta-Analysis of the Market Transition Theory. European Sociological Review, 21(3), 201–226. https://doi.org/10.1093/ esr/jci020 Wendlant, N.  M., & Rochlen, A.  B. (2008). Addressing the College-to-Work Transition: Implications for University Career Counselors. Journal of Career Development, 35(2), 151–165. Williams, A. (2011). The Purpose of Mass Education. Retrieved from https://thehill. com/blogs/pundits-blog/education/145043-the-purpose-of-mass-education Wu, X., & Li, Z. (2019). Independent Freshman Admission Program (IFAP) and Talent Selection in Higher Education in China: Evidence from National Elite Universities [In Chinese]. Chinese Journal of Sociology, 37(5), 139–164. Wu, X., & Treiman, D. J. (2004). The Household Registration System and Social Stratification in China: 1955–1996. Demography, 41(2), 363–384. Wu, Y., & Huang, C. (2016). The School Stratification and Students’ Educational Expectations in Chinese Primary Education [In Chinese]. Social Science in China, 4, 113–127. Xi, C. (2015). The Enrollment of Alibaba Has Been Reduced by 85%. The Received Offer Were Gone [In Chinese]. Retrieved from http://business.sohu. com/20150907/n420521850.shtml Xiao, F. (2014). Effect of the Urban and Rural Background on College Students’ Initial Employment – Based on the Survey Data of 2,914 College Students in 17 Universities and Colleges Nationwide [In Chinese]. Journal of Guangxi University for Nationalities (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), 36(4), 178–184. Xiao, F., & Zhang, D. (2015). The Difference of Initial Employment between Rural and Urban University Graduates – A Study on the Employment Feature of Rural Graduates [In Chinese]. Journal of Guangxi Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 51(5), 67–75. Xiao, J., Newman, B. M., & Chu, B.-s. (2016). Career Preparation of High School Students: A Multi-Country Study. Youth & Society, 50, 818–840. Xie, Y., & Zhou, X. (2014). Income Inequality in Today’s China. PNAS, 111(19), 6928–6933. Xie, Z., & Wang, W. (2005). The Variation in College Admission Opportunities among Children of Different Social Strata – Schools and Majors [In Chinese]. University Education Science, 4, 58–62. Xu, D. (2017). From Poverty to Prosperity: Poverty, Non-Cognitive Abilities, and First-Job Earning [In Chinese]. Chinese Journal of Sociology, 37(4), 90–118. Yang, C. (2007). The Proposal and Termination of Chinese College Expansion [In Chinese]. Journal of Yunan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 111(02), 151–153.

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Yue, C., & Ding, X. (2004). Factors Associated with Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates [In Chinese]. Journal of National Academy of Education Administration, 2, 80–86. Zeng, X. (2004). The Changing Employment Environment and the Employment of Chinese College Graduates [In Chinese]. Beijing, China: Renmin University of China Press. Zhang, W., & Jiang, C. (2017). An Analysis of Factors Associated with Expectant Work of University Students [In Chinese]. Education Research Monthly, 10, 79–87. Zhao, A. (2014, February). There Is No Noticeable Difference Between College Graduates from Urban and Rural Area [In Chinese]. People’s Daily. Zhu, B. (2018). Cultural Reproduction or Cultural Mobility? A Study on the Inequality of College Students’ Educational Achievements in China [In Chinese]. Sociological Studies, 1, 142–168.

CHAPTER 3

WU, the Prestigious Path, and Initial Difference

3.1   WU Located in Shanghai, one of the major cities on the east coast of China, WU has a reputation as one of the nation’s best public universities. It was listed as one of the top-100 national universities in the Project 211 program, issued by the State Council and the Ministry of Education, in 1995. In the recent “Double-First” Plan ranking created by the Ministry of Education, WU has been awarded the title of “best university” with the “best majors.” WU’s well-maintained campus conjures an image of a classic Western liberal arts college in a Chinese style, dotted with examples of traditional Chinese architecture dating back to the college’s founding in the 1900s along with more modern buildings. The locale blends a quiet campus with adjacent busy commercial surroundings. A few blocks away from the south gate of campus, a city highway and a subway station bring people to the college. A huge shopping district with multiple high-rise buildings looms half a mile away. North of the campus, a street lined with cafeterias and restaurants offers a range of cuisines, from Shanghai local to Cantonese,

Some materials in this chapter are used from Felicia F. Tian, Lin Chen, (2018). Unequal at the college door: Career construction among freshmen at an elite Chinese university. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 38(11/12), pp. 1041–1056. © The Author(s) 2020 F. F. Tian, L. Chen, Higher Education and Career Prospects in China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1510-1_3

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Sichuan, Japanese, American, Thai, and even Turkish. This leisurely ­atmosphere attracts students and locals for dating and Friday nights out. WU has long had a reputation as one of the best destinations for the most talented Chinese students wishing to pursue majors in the arts and sciences. The student body is highly selective, given that they had to reach the provincial top 5% in the college entrance examinations to be admitted. The tuition, set as with all public universities by the Ministry of Education, is calibrated to attract high-achieving students of a variety of family backgrounds. Yet, as Chinese college admission is itself stratified by family background (see Chap. 2) and as the cost of living on the east coast is comparatively high, WU attracts more urban students than students from rural areas. To increase the diversity of the study body, every year, some rural students from the more impoverished areas are able to enroll in WU through the Take-Off Plan (see Chap. 1), which basically lower their admission scores by 20–30 points. Inspired by and modeled on American liberal arts colleges, WU promotes general education and encourages free exploration among students. Every undergraduate student, regardless of major, needs to take introductory classes from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and medicine. For courses required for particular majors, there is no arbitrary sequence. Students are the ones who decide their course schedules and sequences as long as they fulfill all the credit requirements for their majors. It is totally fine, for example, to take Political Science 101 along with thesis writing in the senior year. Hui, from Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei Province, finds it is the “freedom” at WU that she found most impressive: My strongest feeling about WU is freedom. You can listen to lectures you want to hear, go to seminars you want to attend, and participate in activities you are interested in. Your ideas are respected. You can find people who have ideas similar to yours and who will have extensive discussions with you. You get understanding and support from a variety of faculty members, and even some renowned, distinguished professors are available for us, the undergraduates. Even if they don’t like [your ideas], they won’t stop you from trying. WU offers a relaxing and diverse environment that is like a bird flying into an unlimited sky.

In addition to the flexibility and autonomy embedded in the curricular study, WU has a very active student body, with over 100 student ­associations. Each year, at the beginning of the fall and spring semesters,

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these student associations offer a two-day fair in four basketball fields where they recruit incoming students. The purpose of these associations ranges across a large spectrum, from studies to sports, from arts to music, and from volunteering to socializing. Each association presents itself in a designated stand. Students can stroll through rows of stands, such as a stand advertising job-related skills training, a stand recruiting volunteers to remote villages, a stand hung with posters of anime and manga, a stand about dramatic acting, and a stand about the Peking Opera. With campus culture emphasizing free exploration, WU students see college as a “bubble,” referring to their feeling that college life on the WU campus is disconnected from the “real world,” that is, society and labor market. For them, college is a time for self-exploration, for seeking out all the possibilities they can find. It is considered unwise to limit oneself to certain college majors while in college; unwise to settle down on a certain career path early on; unwise to limit oneself to certain jobs right after college. Thus, a trend exists on the WU campus that students do not desire to work immediately after graduation. Some students do not even enter the labor market; their aim is more to fulfill their identity and social desirability than to have material gains. The self-exploration process is still in progress. Fan, a senior in sociology who graduated with a job in an internet company in Hangzhou, told us the following in an in-depth interview: A good future is a relative free life. In a material sense, it does not necessarily [mean] a high salary or a good living condition, but a type of spiritual freedom. For example, I like my [current] internet job, but I was not particularly interested in real estate from my previous intern experience… About the life I want in the future, I don’t have a clear idea at the moment… I think freedom is an ideal state. I can work for it but it may not necessarily happen… I think I should more or less do what I like and just be myself.

Consistent with this free-exploration college culture, WU takes a laisse-­ faire approach toward students’ career construction. WU does not provide a model career path but, instead, encourages students to seek their own identities and passions. Compared with introducing abundant job opportunities, the career center at WU emphasizes less specific guidance and training for career-related skills. The career center is attentive to problem-­ solving rather than career counseling, spending the vast majority of its time handling cases for students who cannot find jobs upon graduation. While finding a job is not difficult for WU graduates, many are not keen

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on entering the labor market. According to the 2015 Labor Market Report published by the WU career center, about one-third of students study abroad, another one-third attend domestic graduate school, and the rest enter the labor market.

3.2   The Prestigious Path Although WU students diverge after graduation, through self-reflection and four yearly interviews, we identified a “prestigious path” admired by the majority of students, though disparaged by a few as “what WU students should do.” The prestigious path encourages students to indulge themselves by “seeing the world.” The essence of this prestigious path (“the Path” hereinafter) is to broaden one’s horizons, to have as diverse an experience in college as possible, and, most importantly, to explore one’s identity. After the cohort of students in the study entered their senior year, we asked them about what experience best characterized WU college life. Doing study exchanges in universities abroad was one of the most significant milestones in their realization of the Path, allowing them to experience “what life looks like in foreign countries.” The motto of “seeing the world” cherished by students in many ways resembles that of “emerging adulthood” proposed by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor of psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts: a distinctive, contemporary young adulthood developmental phase featuring prolonged adolescence and identity exploration. In a widely cited paper, Arnett described emerging adulthood: The explorations of emerging adulthood are in part explorations for their own sake, part of obtaining a broad range of life experiences before taking on enduring—and limiting—adult responsibilities… emerging adulthood is the time for trying out unusual work and educational possibilities… emerging adults may also travel to a different part of the country or the world on their own for a limited period, often in the context of a limited-term work or educational experience. This too can be part of their identity explorations, part of expanding their range of personal experiences prior to making more enduring choices of adulthood. (Arnett, 2000, p. 474)

In this sense, the Path of “seeing the world” sees the purpose of education and work not as achieving stability but as exploring and finding one’s identity and passion for life. WU students do not see their college ­education

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as a means of preparing themselves for certain jobs that their majors may possibly offer but of expanding their opportunities to try out different kinds of future work. Liang from Shanghai provided an explicit example: Honestly, I don’t think there is a close relationship between what I am learning now and what I am going to do for my life. It doesn’t matter, though, because if I can actually build some serious marketability in the college, which can be used for my career development, that is enough. Knowledge is not the goal of college. I just need to be ready for the furious competition in society before graduation.

Many students at WU choose graduate schools in either domestic or foreign institutions, which they believe offer a second chance to prolong identity exploration, an opportunity to switch directions from what they had chosen as undergraduates. Dan, whose story will be presented in detail in Chap. 5, claimed, “I have been clear about what I don’t want to do, but with regard to what to do, I think that during the time at graduate school, I will have time to gradually explore it.” For many WU students, the most important questions related to their future careers or jobs, including: What kind of work am I interested in? What kind of work would I find satisfactory? The major institutional support provided by WU for this “seeing the world” path is its various study-abroad programs. WU is very enthusiastic about the foreign exchange experience, frequently advertising it to students and branding it as one of the key merits of an education at WU. WU establishes many exchange programs with top universities in East Asia, Europe, and North America and sends students in bulk or individually to these international partners. These study-abroad programs range from as long as a year to as short as two months (i.e., summer vacation), but the majority of them take about one semester. To lower the barrier for applications, many programs are exempt from tuition. For students with financial hardship, WU provides additional scholarships to provide monthly stipends to cover living expenses abroad. The goal in the near future, as announced by the Provost, is to enable every undergraduate student at WU, regardless of family background, experience a foreign country. During the student orientation, student counselors usually list several “to-dos” in chronological order (see Table 3.1). There are also two “must-­ dos” for students to focus on: Foreign exchange programs and internships in the sophomore and junior years. Every student, before landing a

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Table 3.1  “To-Do” list as a WU student Junior

Freshman

Sophomore

Senior

Objective

Adaptation

“Seeing the world”

Graduation

To-Do

Pass English proficiency test (e.g., TOFEL, IELTS) Declare a major Important: build up GPA

Study abroad (sophomore spring/junior fall) Internship Important: build up GPA

Thesis writing Graduation party! Graduation trips! Graduation photo!

Translated and summarized by the authors

­ articular job, should check these two boxes. Foreign exchange programs p are a way to experience “what a foreign society feels like.” Internships allow them to get an idea of “what the real society feels like.” The objective of a freshman is adaptation. The two things that need to be accomplished that year are to pass the English proficiency tests (e.g., the TOEFL and the IELTS) and to declare a major. The English proficiency test score is the main evaluation criterion for foreign exchange programs. Students should pass it as quickly as possible and score as high as possible. At the end of the first year, each student also needs to declare a major among the six departments in the social sciences—sociology, social work, anthropology, political science, international relations, and administration management. Incoming students need to increase their GPAs because it is a crucial factor to get into the desired major. The GPA is also a baseline measure for a variety of scholarships and awards in later college years. The sophomore and junior years are reserved for “seeing the world,” that is, attending foreign exchange programs and doing internships. When to do the exchange programs is a tricky question and pretty much relates to the length of the program in which a student wants to participate. If students want to take one year off to study abroad, it is best to do it in the sophomore year, which leaves the junior year to keep up on credits and do internships. If students plan to take one semester off to study abroad, it is recommended to do it in the spring semester of the sophomore year or the fall semester of the senior year. Usually, the fall semester is better than the spring semester because the calendar of the spring semester at WU varies by the time of the Chinese Spring Festival. If the year-round or ­one-­semester

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programs are not feasible, some two-month summer programs can be another viable option but not many students opt for them. However, the spring semester of the junior year is usually too late for studying abroad. It is the time to do internships. Students usually want to spend six months to one year or even longer in internships, especially when they want to be considered dependable and loyal by future employers. Senior year is the time for graduation. It has only one to-do on the list: to pass the senior thesis, as is required of every undergraduate student in Chinese universities. Still, students have to continue to find their way after graduation. Those planning to attend graduate school abroad apply in the fall semester. The connections they built during foreign exchange programs are helpful for obtaining favorable letters of recommendation. Those planning to attend graduate school in China also need to go through a departmental recommendation process (tui mian), depending on their GPAs, or prepare for the national graduation school entrance exam in the fall. For those planning to work, the campus career fairs, held twice at the beginning of the fall and spring semester, are their best shot. If everything goes smoothly, students can apply for graduation at the beginning of the spring semester, then pass the senior thesis, enjoy graduation parties, organize graduation trips, and take graduation photos. If things do not go as they planned, either by failing to get offers from desired graduate schools or failing to find satisfactory jobs, they can postpone graduation by one year by not finishing the senior thesis. The Path of “seeing the world” is indiscriminately powerful and popular among students. The majority of WU students participated in the foreign exchange programs. Many explained their rationale for participating as “everyone else was going.” When asked what purpose these programs served, many said they serve no purpose other than to “enjoy life” and to “broaden your horizons.” Sun enrolled in a two-month foreign exchange program during the summer of junior year. When asked why, he said, “It’s the last chance for me to do an exchange in the summer. Everyone’s doing it, so I have to, too.” WU and its counselors may paint a rosy picture of college life, but the boxes offered in Table 3.1 are not always a recipe for a successful school-­ to-­work transition. Every future plan needs to prepare separately and requires specific sets of skills. If students plan to apply for graduate schools abroad, for example, they have to first take the TOEFL or the IELTS, and then move to the GRE or the GMAT. Some also take Japanese, French, or German proficiency tests to show their versatility with languages. These

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tests all relate to which graduate program they want to pursue and which country they want to go to. GPA is another important factor for graduate schools abroad. Students usually strive for a GPA higher than 3.5. If they want to go to graduate schools in China, GPA is probably the only key that determines one’s chances of being recommended to desirable graduate schools (tui mian). If students want to apply for Chinese graduate schools in a different major, they need to prepare for the national graduate school entrance examination held every December and if the scores are high enough, an interview will follow in March. If students plan to work after graduation, multiple internships are needed and cumulative work experience in relevant industries and companies must be acquired to fill up the résumé. While WU is quite enthusiastic about the study-abroad experience, when senior students look back on their college life, they see both pros and cons. It does expand their horizons and fill up their résumés. Especially for students who plan to go abroad for graduate school, it may be a good chance to experience non-Chinese ways of life. Ren, a senior majoring in political science who initially planned to leave the country for graduate school but then decided to work after graduation, said that the study-­ abroad program had made clear to him what graduate study in a foreign university would be like: When I applied for [the study-abroad program at] Sydney University, I was not 100% sure whether I wanted to work or get a master’s. Maybe I would prepare for both. Study abroad is a good opportunity provided by WU, and many credits can be transferred. Although Sydney is a cherished memory of my life in college, it was nice to know that I am not really cut out for overseas study… So starting working directly after graduation becomes a good option.

But for those who went to work right after graduation, without carefully planning, the cost of exchange programs can outweigh the benefits. If credits obtained abroad could not be transferred to WU, it might postpone their graduation or at least occupy the time they needed to use to do internships. Students may be forced to grab any quick internships they can get or credit-cram. Another problem is that several boxes in the “to-do” list inherently contradict each other. The exchange experience with the internship listed above is one example. The other one is taking internships while applying

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for graduate school, both abroad and domestic. Internships generally require extensive working hours, usually eight hours a day and three to four days a week. If students do internships, the limited spare time makes it difficult for them to maintain their grades and prepare for English proficiency tests and/or national graduate school entrance examinations. One way to determine how much students gain from the Path of “seeing the world,” as senior students reflected, is to ask to what extent they know what they want in the future when checking those boxes. However, as we will soon show, this is not always the case. Incoming students show noticeable differences in terms of career preparation when they come to college. Urban students, particularly those from municipalities and provincial capitals, have long seen college as part of their future careers, whereas students from rural areas have to spend more effort to adapt to college life. These initial differences accumulate in the first year of college, through curricular and extracurricular activities, and ultimately result in different rationales for choosing majors.

3.3   Initial Differences in Career Awareness Most students come to WU with little career knowledge. This is mainly because the majority of Chinese high schools focus primarily on test scores. Chinese high schools usually tell students that gaining access to top universities represents the height of achievement. Hansen’s ethnography of a town boarding school in China shows high school students do not typically relate college to career development. Instead, just getting into college already means a bright future will come along: “… [U]niversities would turn out to be an entrance to money, stability status, and possibility, their parents’ satisfaction and admiration.” (Hansen, 2015, p.  66). Students typically apply to universities that rank the highest that their test scores can reach, with very vague ideas about majors or university locations, let alone future career development. As Sun wrote in his self-­ reflection, “In high school, I was trained like a soldier to conform to school schedules. This made me very focused to do well in the college entrance exams to enter WU.” Despite this universal lack of career knowledge, students of different family backgrounds do have different levels of understanding about careers when they arrive on campus. In the second week of the first semester, we did a survey of students’ perceptions of adulthood. Among the markers of adulthood, we listed “full-time employment” and “long-term career” as

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two separate markers. A job and a career mean different things. A career is a developmental process in which individuals integrate their self-concepts into jobs as a means of self-expression (Super, 1990). In the career exploration stage, college students typically develop the capacity, attitudes, interests, and needs associated with self-concept. Jobs can relate to career, but they may also be merely a way of making a living that has nothing to do with their identity. We considered those who thought that “being employed full-time” as important for having an initial understanding of a job and those who thought of “settling into a long-term career” as important for having an initial understanding of career. Figure 3.1 compares the understanding of careers by area of origin. The three groups of students do not differ much in terms of the initial understanding of jobs but diverge sharply in their initial ­understanding of careers.

Fig. 3.1  Differences in career and job awareness between incoming students from rural areas, from towns and small cities, as well as from municipal cities and provincial capitals

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The three groups have a roughly similar level of initial understanding of jobs. Fewer than 40% of students from towns or small cities consider “being employed full-time” as a marker of adulthood, followed by about 35% of students from municipal and capital cities. The percentage for students from rural areas is the lowest among the three groups, about 27% of students who had a similar idea. The differences between the groups in their initial understandings of career are sharper than their differences in their initial understanding of jobs. Approximately 75% of students from municipal and capital cities considered “settling for a long-term career” important as compared to 64% of students from towns and small cities and fewer than 50% of students from rural areas. To further test for the relationship between area of origin and career/ job awareness, we run logistic regressions, with controls for gender, age, sibling size, and parents’ education (Table 3.2). Area of origin is significantly associated with the initial understanding of careers but not with the initial understanding of jobs. The significant difference in the initial understanding of careers is between students from municipalities and provincial capital cities and students from rural areas. Students from capital cities or municipalities, compared with their counterparts from rural areas, are

Table 3.2 Coefficients from logistic regression predicting understanding of career and the initial understanding of job

Area of origin (reference = rural)  Town/small city  Capital/municipal Controls Constant Log-likelihood Na

the

initial

Initial understanding of career

Initial understanding of job

Coefficient

Standard Error

Coefficient

Standard Error

0.831 1.314∗ Added −3.867 −117.954 194

(0.524) (0.613)

0.375 0.194 Added −9.683 −118.186 188

(0.565) (0.648)

(5.257)

(5.086)

Control variables include gender, age, sibling size (dummy, no sibling vs with sibling), and parents’ education (junior high or lower, senior high, college and up) p