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Higher Education and Career Prospects in China 1st ed. 2020 Edition Felicia F. Tian full chapter instant download
Higher Education and Career Prospects in China 1st ed. 2020 Edition Felicia F. Tian full chapter instant download
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Higher Education
and Career
Prospects in China
Higher Education
and Career Prospects
in China
Felicia F. Tian Lin Chen
Fudan University Fudan University
Shanghai, China Shanghai, China
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
vii
viii FOREWORD
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 emerg-
ing 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 conversa-
tions 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 conversa-
tions 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 effec-
tively maintained inequality) under conditions of massified higher educa-
tion. It also complicates those debates by demonstrating the centrality and
complexity of human agency. Thus, Tian and Chen’s conclusions will push
x FOREWORD
colleagues who favor quantitative analysis to more fully specify their mod-
els. In addition, because the vivid case material so powerfully illustrates
how school-based programs and interventions by mentors empower stu-
dents 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.
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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
xiii
xiv Contents
8 Conclusion147
8.1 Reflections on College and the Construction on Careers149
8.2 Study Implications155
8.3 Summary159
References161
xvii
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 diffi-
cult 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
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 sup-
ports 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 under-
stand the code and conduct of the privileged, enjoy an initial advantage in
college compared to other students for whom college culture is more dif-
ficult 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 accord-
ing 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 main-
stream. 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 tran-
scended. According to the equalizer myth, Rong and Fei would experi-
ence no difference in their career construction process, despite the sharp
differences in their parents’ education, income, expectations about the
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*****
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