Educational Inequality And Regional Variation In Urbuan China During The Period Of Transition

The relationship between education and stratum was a traditional issue in the research ofsocial structure, education has been a key channel for upward mobility in industrializedsocieties, and educational attainment across generations is indicative of the relative opennessof both societies and social stratification systems, a central issue in stratification research hasbeen the relationship between family social origins and educational attainment, especially therole of parental economic, social, and cultural capital in advancing children’s educationalattainment and upward mobility. Expeirences from westenr industrial society showed that, theeducation both promoted social equality, and also maintained social inequality to some extent.The accumulated evidence of marked stability in patterns of educational stratificationunderscores the intergenerational inheritance of family social status, researchers document-ed"persistent inequality" in educational attainment in a variety of social context. Thispersistence has been explained by the stability of the social-class structure that links childrenof different class backgrounds with differential educational opportunities. From this view,patterns of educational attainment depend on macro social conditions，such as the classstructure.The author used the regional variation and institutional analysis to examine themechanisms of how regional factors such as the educational expansion, economicdevelopment or social polarization affected the educational attainment between the initialstage(1978-1991) and The deepening stage (1992-2006)of the reform.First，we found that the regional variation of personal education years between county issigniifcantly increasing in the deepening stage of the reform than in the initial stage. The ICCbetween counties increase from22.1%to26.8%,duirng the different stage. At the sametime，the regional educational inequality generated from personal gender，father’s politicalstatus and family oirgin enlarged. The random effects of gender，father’s political status andfamily origin exist signiifcantly, It’s fit for us to use multilevel model to estimate the variationof the educational attainment(include senior highschool and college transfer) betweencounties.Second, beyond expectation, we found that educational expansion not bring about the inequality of educational attainment，however, It’s the different regional economic and socialdevelopment which promote the inequality of educational attainment to a high level. we canfind the limitation of the MMI (mainly maintain inequality hypothesis) from the concretechange of educational inequality.Third,we found the obviously different model of educational attainment between theinitial stage and The deepening stage of the reform, in the initial stage，with the increase ofregional economic development and social polarization, the educational inequality originatedin gender and family background emerged equalization effect, nevertheless，in the deepeningstag of reform, the equalization effect disappeared，to our expected，in higher educationstage,our findings provinde strong evidence of increasing regional educational inequality inurban，a time of rapid economic growth and marketizing/or entry into college, the effects offamily educational background are highly siginiifcant and their magnitudes is sizable. Inoherwords，in the region with more developed economy，the more educational advantagedfamily will favor more educational intergenerational ability.Finally, regardless persortnal educationyears or entry into senior highschool andcollege,we can see the regional vairation Increase step by step. Most of all,we found thatinequality in higher education attainment keeps in close touch with regional economic andsocial development. However, the compensatory developmental approach of biasingeducational resources toward the middle and lower strata also did not work as expected,failing to reverse their educational disadvantages. An alternative approach to minimizingdisparity in education is to perfect the social secuirty system and comprehensively narrow thegaps in living standards between social strata.