At This Stage Of China's Higher Education Equalization Of Opportunities For Research

The issue of equality of educational opportunity has been a frequent topic in the education field. From the perspective of research objects, it can be classified into several different subfields, including opportunity equality of basic education and opportunity equality of higher education. Meanwhile, the concept of equality of educational opportunity has three specific contents-access equality, educational process equality, and educational consequence equality. This thesis focuses on the issue of opportunity equality of higher education in current China.This paper deals with, firstly, the concept of equality of educational opportunity and related notion of education equity and discusses the method of measuring it, which forms the basis of empirical analysis. Then the analytical framework and underlying assumptions in this paper are presented. In this paper, we treat higher education as a quasi-public good, which falls into the paradigm of educational economics.Based on the above-mentioned discussions, this thesis analyzes the current state of opportunity equality of higher education access in China. We do so through four different perspectives, i.e., family background, social strata, divergence between urban and rural areas, and different geological locations perspectives. We try to reveal the magnitude of the differences, if any, in opportunity equality among these different background students. The finding is as follows: There does exist remarkable difference in opportunities of higher education access among different groups. The disparity can also be seen in the fact that different groups' children tend to choose different kinds of colleges and majors, which are different in quality and the potential to bring benefits to the graduates.Finally, the reasons for the revealed gap are investigated, which include the influence of Chinese educational institutions as well as the role of students' family background. After the discussion of valuable experiences of improving equality of educational opportunity by some foreign developed countries, we propose a couple of policy suggestions of how to narrow the current gap in opportunity equality of higher education access. These are, we believe, the necessary steps to deal with that problem.