Educational Attainment and Career Aspiration of Contemporary Chinese Rural Youth

• Main Author: Zhu, Dai
• Format: Others
• Language: English; en
• Published: TU Darmstadt 2011
• Online Access: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/2749/1/Educational_Attainment_and_Career_Aspiration_of_Contemporary_Chineses_Rural_Youth.pdf; Zhu, Dai <http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/view/person/Zhu=3ADai=3A=3A.html> (2011): Educational Attainment and Career Aspiration of Contemporary Chinese Rural Youth.Darmstadt, TU Darmstadt, Technische Universität, [Ph.D. Thesis]

China has experienced rapid increase in inequality since the beginning of economic reforms. The paper aims to investigate educational inequality between urban and rural Chinese youth and how this inequality influences their job preferences after graduation at the turn of the twenty-first century. We used data conducted by CASS in 2005 about Chinese social transformation. The quantitative research was also used. This paper advances and draws on the following six propositions. Chapter 1 is an introduction of contemporary Chinese society and educational attainment; Chapter 2 examines the process of getting enrolled into and graduating from college, trying to assess differential patterns between urban and rural youth, analyzes the institutional obstacles for rural students' higher educational attainment, and estimates the job seeking experience of urban- and rural-origin college graduates to see if they tend to make different career choices; Chapter 3, 4 and 5 test three central hypotheses; and Chapter 6 summarizes results and significance. The three central hypotheses are: a) In order to get higher education, rural Chinese students have to overcome more institutional blockages than their urban counterparts; b) After graduation from colleges, people with rural-origin are more likely to pursue positions in formal institutional sectors (that is, within the state socialistic redistribution system) than their urban counterparts; c) Though rural-origin college graduates have recognized the importance of institutional factors in structuring people's life chances through higher educational attainment process and they have intention to pursue a position in formal institutional sectors, they have different mobility trajectories in-and-outside formal institution from urban counterparts due to the restriction of non-institutional factors in labor market.