The Research Of Higher Education Opportunities Of National Minorities

There are 55 ethnic minorities which take up largely in the whole population and distributed widely in China. Ethnic issue has great significance to the Northwest even to the whole country. Studying the access to educational opportunities for minorities from Sociological perspective will be a meaningful contribution to reveal the exact status of ethnic groups'higher education opportunities and understand the fair degree of minority education. What's more, it is good for adhering to research tradition of social transformation and social changes and better for promoting theory development of field of social structure.Through reviews of more representative related articles, this paper thinks studies of higher education opportunities in the past lack concerns of women, minorities and less developed areas as well as rare in deep and detailed studies. Meanwhile, most researches have ignored the comparison among ethnic groups.The paper is guided by the methodology of positivism, and is researched by means of quantitative method. A college in northwest China was taken as the case. The information in the paper was collected by ways of documentary and questionnaires, and is analyzed by SPSS software which is both descriptive and explanatory. Descriptions, which are related to ethnic distribution, geographic distribution, professional structure as well as their parents'class distribution and so on, are not only concerned about the status of higher education groups in the Northwest of China, but also try to analyze structural features of national society.Through the analysis of a small sample, we find education in regions inhabited by ethnic groups, especially higher education, has greatly improved; region is a more important factor, so the same ethic in different regions has differences on the level of the quality and the layer of higher education; opportunities for female minority in higher education differ between urban and rural areas, while female minority from urban areas may have a greater advantage; family background factors may influence the professional choice of minority students. At the same time, this study concluded that society in the Northwestern has the following structural features:ethnic groups in different areas in down-sizing, mainly in rural areas; the relatively single and at a quite lower level; the general educational level of inhabitants is not high. The income gap between urban and rural areas is still significant. And in ethnic minority areas may be greater than the rate of non-inhabited areas.Although research data is partial, what it concerns is broad. That is to say, how should we understand the social structure of ethnic regions? From the analysis on the paper, ethnic differentiation within society is consistent with the general nature of society in China. In other words, the differences in the aspects of educational inequality and wealth possession between urban and rural areas is much larger than those among the ethnic groups.This reminds us that when we discuss population issues, we should focus on ethnic differences and give full attention to the common problems which are ubiquitous in all ethnic groups.From the point of view in the paper, a solid research can not be avoided if you want to further understand ethic society. We can advance a theory with enough explanation power only through going into matters deeply so that academic value can be fully realized. The discussion in this paper is a useful attempt which has certain reference meanings in promoting ethnic groups study in Northwestern.