Unpacking the Extraordinary Academic Success of Rural Students

Over the past three decades, the unprecedented expansion of enrollments for higher education has led to the continual devaluation of university degrees in China (Fan and Ding 2013). Admission to elite universities has become increasingly important for rural youngsters who, without strong guanxi or social capital in the competitive labor market, are eager to move up the social ladder. A growing number of empirical studies (Yang 2006; Luo 2011; Li 2014; Wu, X 2016) attests to the fact that the proportion of rural students is very likely to be negatively associated with the prestige of universities they attend. Studies in the field are usually preoccupied with the economic, social and cultural obstacles that contribute to academic failure among many rural teenagers (Yu 2004; Gao 2011; Xie 2016; Li 2017). But, how small numbers of rural teenagers manage to enter prestigious universities has largely remained a black box.

Cultural barriers to academic success are usually more difficult to overcome than poverty (Li 2010; Hannum, An, and Cherng 2011; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). Researchers argue that, in comparison to their urban counterparts, rural students in China are more likely to encounter academic failure.

The meritocratic character of school education (in textbooks, the medium of instruction, and examinations) give primacy to mainstream urban culture (Li 1999; Yu 2004; Wu, J 2016). The distance between the national school curriculum and rural life is revealed in the rural students’ shortage of mainstream cultural capital. This becomes a formidable obstacle in the school career of rural students. Studies in this volume illustrate how rural students’ disadvantage in cultural capital is addressed and compensated by rural families, school teachers, and rural students themselves.

The first paper is a collaborative work by Professor Yu Xiulan and her student Han Yan. Professor Yu has long been known in the field for her pioneering work on how cultural capital (the preferences for urban culture in school education) leads to academic failure for the majority of China’s rural students (Yu 2004). Yu and Han illustrate how underprivileged students are successful in gaining admission to University A—a top-tier institution. Yu and Han specify that underprivileged students only receive spiritual or verbal support from their parents, but the learning atmosphere at school, the inspiring teachers, and their outstanding classmates made up for their disadvantages in cultural capital. Moreover, the financial and cultural predicament engenders certain forms of embodied cultural capital unique for underprivileged students, i.e., the determination to upgrade their lives through their own efforts. In short, Yu and Han overturn conventional thinking by arguing that certain unique forms of cultural capital also leads to exceptional academic success for some underprivileged rural students.

In the second paper, Xiong Heni and Wang Xiaofang investigate how four working-class students, three born to rural parents, at elite universities benefit from the educational power of their parents’ language. Working-class language, with an inclination toward practicality, is defined by Bernstein (2003) as a restricted code and largely detrimental to the academic progress of working-class students. Yet, Xiong and Wang find that working-class students in China acquired, from the reflexive and reiterated language of their parents, the belief that only by making tireless efforts could they achieve school success and upward social mobility. Working-class parents’ verbal commitment to children’s schooling not only motivates working-class students to concentrate intensely on their schoolwork, but it also places enormous mental pressure on working-class students.

In the third paper, Dong Yonggui examined how ten rural students managed to compensate for disadvantages in cultural capital through their individual efforts and their school teachers. Rural students in this study firmly believed that only by education could they escape the toil in the countryside. While economic poverty usually hinders rural students from academic achievement, poverty actually eliminates many distractions and helps rural students to concentrate on their schoolwork. Rural students in Dong’s study only received encouragement and some tutoring and resources from their school teachers and classmates.

The last two papers are developed by Professor Kang Yongjiu and two of his students, Hu Xuelong and Cheng Meng. In the fourth paper, Hu and Kang employed a grounded theory approach to investigate the school success of rural students. They argue that “dutifulness,” a character stressed in certain rural families, was integral to rural students’ admission to prestigious universities. “Dutifulness” in their study is defined as “regarding diligent studies as the fundamental standard for their actions, and harboring not the slightest doubt with respect to its rationality.” In this sense, Hu and Kang took dutifulness as a form of cultural capital, for they believe that schools expect students to perform duties such as “assiduousness, the capacity to endure hardship, and patience.” Although Hu and Kang deliberately demarcate dutifulness from diligent efforts at schoolwork, the two items seem quite inextricable.

In the fifth paper, Cheng and Kang focus their study on empathy, a moral character common to rural students admitted to prestigious universities. Based on reflexive autobiographies and in-depth interviews with rural students, Cheng and Kang reveal show that empathy facilitates rural students to make exceptional academic achievements while hindering intimacy with their parents. Aware of their parents’ suffering and incapacity at the bottom rung of society, rural students at an early age take hard work and the struggle for success at school as a way to share the family burden with their parents. Still, pursuing school success and being wed to a long and difficult journey with an uncertain future, actually demonstrates that rural students are not necessarily as empathetic as they might appear.

Studies in this volume add weight to Bourdieu’s insight that family upbringing and schooling function as the primary and secondary sources of cultural capital, respectively (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979, 1990). On the one hand, the generous support from school teachers and outstanding classmates is a key factor in the extraordinary school success of selected rural students. One the other hand, despite their economic and cultural plight, selected rural households manage to cultivate their offspring with strong motivation and commitment to pursuing school success. Moreover, qualities such as “dutifulness” and “empathy” constitute forms of cultural capital per se or channels for the accumulation of cultural capital.

The kind of cultural capital that is operationalized in the above studies is obviously distinguished from that articulation by Bourdieu as being essential to the transmission of privilege across generations through school education (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). While cultural capital can be flexibly employed in different educational situations and fields, the cultural preferences embedded in the evaluation norms of an educational field has to be made salient (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). In her earlier works, Professor Yu Xiulan (Yu 2004) demonstrated the flexible yet rigorous way that cultural capital is operationalized in the Chinese context. It is illuminating to find that some rural students acquire, from their families, certain distinctive forms of cultural capital that empower their academic success. Further study and empirical rigor is needed to address two specific questions:

1. How do the evaluative norms of academic performances take distinctive cultural traits of exceptional rural students into account?

2. How do exceptional rural families cultivate their children with distinctive cultural traits—not found among the majority of rural families?

That being said, the five studies in this volume, focusing on the life trajectories of some exceptional rural students, give us a peek into understanding how selected poor rural students overcome the overwhelming odds and cultural obstacles on their path to prestigious universities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Li Xiaoliang

Li Xiaoliang is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education, Northwest Normal University.