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Massification of Higher Education: Challenges for Admissions and Graduate Employment in China

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Managing International Connectivity, Diversity of Learning and Changing Labour Markets

Abstract

With a strong conviction to transform the country and prepare its people to cope with the growing challenges of the globalizing market, the Chinese government has actively increased more opportunities of higher education. The higher education system experienced a transformation from elite to mass form. The massification of higher education has provided more and more accesses to junior college and universities, and subsequently produced a growing number of college graduates looking for jobs in labor market. Similar to other East Asian countries/economies like South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the strong impacts of China’s expansion of higher education on higher education admission and labor market are expected to appear. College students start to doubt the effect of higher education massification on bringing more equality in admission and improving their competitiveness in the job market. This, in turn, leads to a wide dissatisfaction of higher education development in China. Realizing students coming from different family backgrounds may confront diverse experiences in higher education admission, graduate employment, and opportunity for upward social mobility, this chapter sets out against the policy context highlighted above to critically examine the impact of the massification of higher education on admissions and subsequently on graduate employment and social mobility in contemporary China. In the final section, this chapter also reflects upon reconstructing new education governance framework in promoting educational equality when higher education is massively expanded.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The statistics on the size of age cohort is not available. This study uses the number of students enrolled in primary school as the proxy for students at school age, as China implemented compulsory education in 1986.

  2. 2.

    According to Trow’s indicator of higher education development (the gross enrollment rate, i.e., the percentage of age group enrolling in higher education), the cutoff point of enrollment rate between elite and mass higher education is 15 %, and that between mass and universal education is 50 %.

  3. 3.

    The data are collected and distributed by the National Survey Research Center at Remin University of China (http://www.cssod.org).

  4. 4.

    CGSS 2006 excludes Ningxia, Qinghai, and Tibet, while CGSS 2008 excludes Qinghai and Tibet.

  5. 5.

    The survey questions of hukou origin of CGSS 2006 and 2008 are slightly different.

  6. 6.

    The college entry cohort is imputed as the year when the individual was 18 years old because: (1) age 6 is eligible for entry to primary school, (2) 6 years of primary schooling, (3) 3 years of lower secondary education and upper secondary education, respectively.

  7. 7.

    Upper class usually has more resource for investing in their offspring’s education, the educational investment is thus class-differentiated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

    Ka Ho Mok

  2. Asia-Pacific Institute for Ageing Studies, Division of Graduate Studies, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, New Territories, Hong Kong

    Jin Jiang

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    Ka Ho Mok

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Mok, K.H., Jiang, J. (2017). Massification of Higher Education: Challenges for Admissions and Graduate Employment in China. In: Mok, K. (eds) Managing International Connectivity, Diversity of Learning and Changing Labour Markets. Higher Education in Asia: Quality, Excellence and Governance. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1736-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1736-0_13

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