| A university student’s choice of a major is related to such factors as job, incomeand social status after his or her graduation. It is safe to say that higher learning is nolonger a scarce social resource in an era of mass higher education. The expectation ofthe public in the past has therefore transformed from getting higher education in auniversity to the current one choosing a good major in a good university.Consequently, the competition in university entrance examination is not reduced bymass higher education but actually made increasingly intense instead.University entrance examination makes different but equally important sense forthe students in urban areas and their rural counterparts. To make a direct comparisonbetween the schools with completely different student structures in urban areas andthose in rural areas makes no sense at all. University entrance examination means a lotmore for the students in rural areas. Only by reaching the entrance standard cansomeone in the countryside jump like a carp over the threshold of being judged as afarmer, meaning he or she can manage to move up to a higher social class. It is knownto all that future lives can be guaranteed only by their choices of good majors in gooduniversities. However, the existing survey results show that financiallydisadvantageous students tend to choose less popular majors to secure safer positionsin the competitions they will face in university entrance exam.University entranceexam is defined for the period of basic education. Nine out of ten exam takers are highschool students. Usually, university students are selected as the subjects in mostresearches on the choices of majors because they have already chosen their majors inhigh schools. This research, however, is made with high school students as thesubjects to find out the internal motive reasons and external factors in their decisionsof choosing majors, and thus to rationalize the relations between the students’ choicesof majors and their family backgrounds. To highlight the effects of familybackgrounds on high school students’ choices of majors, this research is done withtwo groups of students with extremely different family backgrounds in two highschools, one in the city and the other in the countryside, as the subjects.Correspondingly, modules are built for the schools in urban areas and those in ruralareas to compare the choice modules of majors by the students of from differentfamily backgrounds. In the meantime, imbalanced education in rural and urban areas is discussed from the perspective of equality in education.This research is conducted around the following questions: Firstly, for thestudents in the same school who are from good family backgrounds and those who arenot, what are the similarities and difference in their choices of majors? If any, whatare the reasons behind? Secondly, for the students in different schools who are fromsimilar family backgrounds, what are the similarities and differences in their choicesof majors? If any, what are the reasons behind? Thirdly, what is the process offormation of students’ intentions in choosing majors? In such process, how theirintensions are affected by family backgrounds? Fourthly, whether can the relationsbetween high school students’ choices of majors and their family backgrounds bedeemed applicable to the analysis results of researches done by others on the relationsbetween university students’ choices of majors and their family backgrounds? If thereare any differences, what are the reasons? Fifthly, whether or not does inequality ineducation exist in the process of choosing majors? If it does, what is the position ofdifferences in family backgrounds among the factors causing such inequality? Sixthly,what are the solutions to inequality in education caused by the differences in familybackgrounds?The analytical framework of Bourdieu and Coleman on the family background isadopted in this research to explain from three aspects, namely, social capital,economic capital and cultural capital, the relations between students’ choices ofmajors and their family backgrounds. More efforts are put into the exploration of howstudents’ choices of majors are affected by the different proportions of social,economic and cultural capitals so that solutions can be obtained accordingly. Takinginto consideration the fact that parents are the main sources of students’ social,economic and cultural capitals, some parents are therefore interviewed as a part in theauthor’s survey among students so that the relations between students’ choices ofmajors and their family backgrounds can be interpreted at a deeper level.Through theanalysis of the data and the utilization of three kinds of capital theories forinterpretation, the dissertation is summarized as follows: Ideally, such factors asschool rankings, majors, teachers, teaching qualities, students’ scores andpost-graduation expenses are the first and foremost ones that students will considerwhen choosing their majors, while those including their parents’ professions,intensions and incomes are the last that they will think of when making choices ofmajors. This, to a certain extent, shows that on the one hand how to choose majors foruniversity study is not introduced enough in high school period and on the other handfamily factors are still not in a very obvious position in students’ choices of majors.But this does not necessarily mean that family backgrounds have few effects on highschool students’ choices of majors.In an ideal state of choosing majors, familybackgrounds, which hide right behind other factors, affect students’ choices of majorsinvisibly. This is something real to which attention is worth paying. Meanwhile, in anideal state of choosing majors, the choices of majors are homoplastic regardless ofstudents’ family backgrounds. This shows that on the one hand how to choose majorsis not introduced enough to students, thereby making them lack of information aboutthe less popular majors, and on the other hand the students with or without goodfamily backgrounds share the same likings of choosing majors. The currentmechanism, however, has to some degree imposed restrictions on the freedom ofchoosing majors for the students who are not good family backgrounds. Therefore,some proposals are put forward from such perspectives as high schools, universitiesand exam organizers to solve the problems mentioned above in this dissertation. |
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