Editor’s Introduction: Equity in Postgraduate Education in China

The issues of access and equity in higher education are classic topics in the field of sociology of education. Traditionally, research into these issues focused only on the inequality of access to undergraduate education. Recently, however, equity in postgraduate education has also become part of the research agenda as scholars have become more aware of its role in social stratification (Posselt and Grodsky 2017; Posselt et al. 2017). It has been found, for example, that recipients of postgraduate degrees are more likely to be high-income earners (Keister 2014). A recent study has also suggested an increase across different age cohorts of the influence of social origins on the chances of entering postgraduate education (Wakeling and Laurison 2017). Public policy initiatives have been launched since the end of 2010s to widen participation in postgraduate education across different social groups (McCulloch and Thomas 2013). Finally, the expansion of the global higher education sector has also made the study of access and equity in postgraduate education an important research topic (Cantwell et al. 2018). This special issue adds to this wider research agenda by bringing together several empirical studies on this issue from the Chinese context.

China is one step away from successfully transforming its higher education system into one characterized by a high level of participation. Over the past few decades, as competition in the Chinese labor market has become fiercer, the demand for postgraduate education has rapidly increased. In 1999, when China started to expand its higher education sector, the number of postgraduate students enrolled in colleges and universities was around 92,000. By 2018, that number had increased nearly ninefold to more than 800,000. The number of university graduates who choose to study abroad for master’s and doctoral degrees has also increased rapidly.

Liu Lingyu, Shen Wenqin, and Jiang Kai from Peking University are pioneers in looking at the effects of family background on the chances of admission into doctoral education programs in China. In the article they have contributed to this issue, they note the rapid rise in the number of doctoral students in China’s universities and the increasing number of students choosing to pursue doctoral degrees overseas. For example, in the year of 2017, more than 40 percent of master’s program graduates from Peking University and 36 percent from Tsinghua University chose to go abroad to continue their studies. Liu, Shen, and Jiang aim to examine who has access to doctoral education and the influence of their family background. Doctoral degree programs are usually seen to admit candidates based on merit. Using data from a national survey carried out by Peking University, their research enquires into whether this actually guarantees more equality. Their findings suggest that one-fifth of master’s degree holders choose to enroll in doctoral programs, and about 4 percent of these opt for doctoral programs at overseas universities. Those who choose to pursue doctorates are more likely to come from the selective universities included in China’s Double First-Class Initiative. Liu, Shen, and Jiang also find that students’ family backgrounds do affect their chances of admission into doctoral programs. For example, students whose mothers have attained higher levels of education are more likely to enroll in doctoral degree programs, whereas students coming from working-class backgrounds are less likely than their middle-class peers to pursue doctoral degrees. The researchers also find that students from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to go abroad to pursue their doctoral education.

In a second article contributed by Shen and Liu, they examine the issue of gender inequality in doctoral education. They note that the rates of admission of women into doctoral degree programs are seldom examined in the Chinese context. This question, however, has become increasingly important because access to doctoral education overall has expanded, and doctoral education is now a stepping stone for many professional jobs. Since the year 2010, the proportion of female postgraduate students has surpassed that of males. Yet in 2016, only 39 percent of doctoral students were women. Taking this line of enquiry a step further, Shen and Liu examine the gender gaps in different disciplines by looking at the choices made by graduates of master’s degree programs in relation to the pursuit of doctoral degrees. They find that in the humanities and social sciences, male graduates of master’s degree programs are 2.5 times more likely than their female counterparts to enroll in doctoral degree programs, whereas they are 2 times more likely to do so in the sciences. In contrast, in the fields of management, engineering, and agriculture, the likelihood that a master’s degree graduate goes on to pursue a doctoral degree is similar for males and females. Shen and Liu also explore the effect of age on these choices. The willingness to continue on to a PhD program is lower among women older than 30 than it is among younger women. The authors speculate that considerations related to marriage and pregnancy may explain this, a result of the cultural pressures faced by female students.

The article written by Li Zhonglu from Shandong University also examines whether the growth in higher education opportunity has brought greater equality of access to postgraduate education. His research draws on insights from several widely used theories in educational sociology, such as maximally maintained inequality theory, effectively maintained inequality theory, and Boudon’s rational choice theory. The data set he uses for his analysis is the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), jointly supported by professors at Chinese Renmin University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From this national data set, Li focuses his analysis on a subsample selected from a group of universities in Beijing, the capital city of China. Based on these data, he finds that around one-third of university graduates in Beijing choose to pursue postgraduate degrees. Students from selective universities such as those included in the 211 Project are more likely to enroll in graduate school, and students’ family background is also an important predictor of whether they pursue postgraduate education. Li also finds from his analysis that students’ academic performance and the types of universities they come from are both important mediating variables in explaining the relationships between family background and access to postgraduate education. Li argues that privileged families tend to reproduce their advantages by investing more in their children’s education and sending them to more selective universities for their first degree. He implies that children from these families typically also perform better academically. All of these factors increase their chances of obtaining graduate degrees. Finally, parents’ education and family income are both good predictors of the pursuit of degrees from overseas universities.

In their article, Huang Yuheng and Li Minglei focus their analysis on ethnic-minority students’ chances of obtaining postgraduate education. The Chinese government has exerted much effort to improve ethnic-minority students’ access to postgraduate education. However, Huang and Li point out how new policies relating to tuition fees may be disadvantageous to this group of students. In 2014, a fee-charging policy reform came into effect in China, and all students, including those from ethnic-minority backgrounds, have since been required to pay tuition fees. Although a new merit-based scholarship scheme was also launched to ensure financial support for students displaying outstanding academic performance, the authors worry that the fee-charging policy may have lowered ethnic-minority students’ expectations of receiving a postgraduate education. Huang and Li analyze data from the China College Student Survey, a longitudinal national survey chaired by Professor Shi Jinghuan at Tsinghua University. Based on their analysis of survey results collected from 2011 to 2016, they suggest that the expectation of receiving a postgraduate education among students from both Han and ethnic-minority groups decreased after the fee-charging reform. Furthermore, they find that students from ethnic-minority backgrounds are more vulnerable to the side effects of the policy reform.

Inequity in student admissions to PhD programs is another area of concern. Social and institutional stratification appear to work hand-in-hand in determining an individual’s chances of earning a doctoral degree from a prestigious university (Pásztor and Wakeling 2018). The article written by Zhang Xueqian, Li Jinlong, Pei Xu, and Wan Ming examines the institutional causes behind unequal access to doctoral education. In the interest of fairness, the Chinese government has issued regulations requiring universities not to discriminate against postgraduate candidates from less selective universities. The researchers argue that although the central government has articulated the importance of justice and fairness in postgraduate student admissions, individual universities still exercise discrimination in their admissions process. Zhang and colleagues analyze the admissions policies of forty-two so-called “double first-class universities” and point out two mechanisms that discriminate against students from lower-tier universities. First, these universities have a preference (Pianyi) for students recruited through recommendations rather than through testing and for students whose first degree was a full-time bachelor’s degree. This preference excludes students who are not from top-tier universities and graduates who have transitioned from associate degree programs at community colleges to bachelor’s degree programs at four-year colleges and universities. Second, these top-tier universities also directly exclude (Qishi) student applicants whose first degrees were not earned on a full-time basis and applicants from private higher education institutions. Students from underprivileged backgrounds such as working-class and rural communities are less likely to go to top-tier universities for their first degree; thus, these two mechanisms, Pianyi and Qishi, may lower their chances of accessing postgraduate education at top-tier universities.

The amount of published research produced by doctoral students is positively correlated to their research productivity later in their academic career and has been increasingly used by higher education institutions as a recruitment criterion for new faculty (Crane 1965; Hargens and Hagstrom 1967; Pinheiro et al. 2014; Horta and Santos 2016). In practice, professors often think that their doctoral students’ research outputs are influenced by the quality of research training they received at the feeder universities where they received their master’s degrees. When recruiting PhD students, professors usually evaluate their potential by looking at the names of the universities where they received their master’s degrees. Applicants from nonselective universities are usually discriminated against. As students from nonselective universities are more likely to come from underprivileged family backgrounds, this discrimination may bring about inequalities. Chinese universities have reformed their doctoral student admissions system recently, changing from a test-based system to an application-based system. In practice, universities, especially prestigious ones, select applicants who have graduated from top-tier universities. On the surface, the reason for this appears meritocratic: Graduates from top-tier universities are assumed to have a greater research output.

Equity issues related to the employment of postgraduate students are also a rich area for research. Studies show that social background has a more significant impact than degrees on access to elite professions and high-income occupations (Useem and Karabel 1986; Jacob, Klein, and Iannelli 2015; Rivera 2016). Can a doctoral education guarantee fairer access to opportunities in the labor market? Does it help to overcome discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, age, or place of birth? Gao Yao and Yang Jiale explore these questions by analyzing the discrimination experienced by doctoral graduates in the job search process. They use data from a national survey of more than 18,000 doctoral graduates from sixty-one universities. What they reveal in their article is that graduates of doctoral programs experience several types of discrimination when job hunting: discrimination related to their first degree, gender discrimination, age discrimination, geographical discrimination, marriage discrimination, and others. Specifically, high levels of discrimination are reported by doctoral graduates who obtained their first degrees from non–top-tier universities, female graduates, graduates who are older than 34 years old, and married doctoral graduates in western areas of China.

The papers in this special issue explore various equity issues in postgraduate education in China. Most of the papers are empirical reports of analyses conducted on large data sets that help us to understand inequity of access related to gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. The picture they paint adds to an emerging global research area concerned with equity in postgraduate education (Jacob, Klein, and Iannelli 2015; Pásztor and Wakeling 2018; Roksa, Feldon, and Maher 2018; Torche 2018). Although each study is limited in its own way, the papers in this special issue indicate several interesting directions for further exploration. A number of the studies suggest that students from non–top-tier universities are discriminated against by prestigious universities. It would be worth examining why such discrimination persists and whether it produces a less diverse postgraduate student body. More empirical studies are also needed to analyze equity issues in the socialization processes within university and in employment outcomes. Finally, it would also be worthwhile to examine whether postgraduate degrees help intergenerational mobility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xie Ailei

Xie Ailei is an Associate Professor at School of Education, Guangzhou University. Shen Wenqin is an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Education, Peking University.

Shen Wenqin

Xie Ailei is an Associate Professor at School of Education, Guangzhou University. Shen Wenqin is an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Education, Peking University.