Family background as a factor on giving up the opportunity to go to college in China

Abstract

Based on findings from a field survey, this article presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between the family background of Chinese high school graduates and their tendency to give up the opportunity to go to college or other forms of Higher Education (HE). The multinomial logistic regression results indicate that family background has significant influences on a high school graduates' choice to give up the opportunity to go to college. These findings suggest that further surveys into the inequity of the opportunities of attending college, which are related to family background, should be carried out, and from them certain measures be undertaken to address this issue.

Keywords:

• China
• family background (social class)
• the opportunity to go to college
• college entrance exams
• HE expansion

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for support of Peking University Junior Researcher Grant.

Notes

1. The steps of the admission process after the college entrance exam in China are: (1) The provincial admission office (the office) arranges students into different tiers (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th tier) according to their individual scores; (2) The office, taking the universities’ quotas for the specific province and the students' scores into account, determines the cut-off score for each tier; (3) The office then sends the students' ‘digital application folders’ to relevant universities according to the pre-determined tiers. This office, considering the application forms of the students and the admission quotas of the universities, decides the proportion of the students whose folders will be sent (generally 120% of the quotas). The folders of the students who scored beyond the cut-offs are ranked by computer and sent to the universities as ‘folders of the students'; (4) The universities will admit students according to the rules in their admission regulations, decide the final list of students admitted into the universities, and send the rest of the folders back to the provincial admission office via the Internet; (5) After the non-admitted students' folders have all been sent back, if there are still spaces available, the universities make requests for more folders to the office. The office will then rearrange the cut-offs and re-send the folders, or it will rearrange the students who are willing to be adjusted in terms of university and major choice so that they could be admitted into other universities; (6) The office monitors and confirms the admission work; and (7) The universities fill the admission notices according to the list (confirmed by the office), affix their official seal on the notices, and finally send them directly to the students admitted.

2. As far as we know, this kind of tracking survey is still rare in China.

3. A possible reason that these students were not admitted into college is that perhaps they did not fill out relevant tiers in their application forms. Of the students, 604 did not fill the blank for the 3^rd tier; 443 did not fill the blanks for the 3^rd tier and the 4^th tier colleges. Another reason could be that they did not fill in the forms with the appropriate colleges, and thus did not get admitted because they failed to score beyond the cut-off line of the colleges they had specified in their application forms.

4. It is noteworthy that certain students wrote in the questionnaires for the tracking survey that they were admitted by colleges and did not choose to enrol at the colleges, but they did not specify the reasons for giving up the chance to go to college or for choosing to re-take the college entrance exam (either financial reasons or non-financial reasons). Therefore, they are not included in the ‘three types of students' here.

5. From Table 6, in the section ‘have given up the chance to go to college,’ the value of ‘the education level of the mother’ variable for ‘beyond higher vocational colleges’ is zero. Therefore, we did not include this variable in the regression analysis.

6. Because science track and humanities track students take different college entrance exams, we did not use the exam scores here. Instead, the college tier, which could mirror the scores, was used instead.

7. This research is a part of the student financial aid information intervention program. There will be a forthcoming article focusing on RCT; here, only the explanation of the variable of information intervention, which relates to this article, is given: it is a dichotomous variable – the existence of information intervention versus no information intervention. We randomly chose 20 out of 41 counties as the target counties for information intervention and handed out special brochures on the newest financial aid policies of China with explanations of the costs of each tier of university. At the same time, trained student assistants explained all the information to the target students.