Educational Expansion And Education Inequality

Within the current educational system in China, less privileged children living inboth rural and urban areas are at a disadvantage at all stages of education.Their educational attainment is largely influenced by family background factors.During the process of rapid expansion of Socio-economic inequalities, education didnot play a role to narrow down the inequality, its own inequality become an intrinsicmotivation to increase socio-economic inequalities. Education inequality has becomea major factor obstructing social reform and development.With the rapid expansion of education at all levels, what kind of influences doclass disparity, social status and gender differences have to educational opportunitiesfor people, what role do these factors play among school-age population, what kind ofimpact does credential inflation have as a result of educational expansion to eacheducational transition in China, does education expansion to some extent alleviate theproblem of educational inequality, these issues require further study.In this paper, weuse Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS2008) micro data to investigateeducational inequalities among school-age groups during expansion process ofeducation. We analysis factors that could affect the educational opportunities for eachschool-age group on both micro and macro level. On the micro level, we focus on theeffects that fathers educational and occupational difference, children’s regionaldifference and gender difference have to educational opportunities. On the macrolevel, according to the "relative risk aversion" theory, we use the results fromestimations of a series of partial proportional odds models to build “risk factor” forcredential inflation to reflect the macro-level condition. Our purpose is to analysis theissue of credential inflation and its effects to educational transitions. Finally, based onideas of Mare’s model, we try to combine the macro-level factors with familybackground factors together to give a thorough analysis of the effects that they couldhave to the educational opportunities at different educational stages.In first part of our analysis, we discuss the expansion of education of high schooland college, and the impact of credential inflation to labor market. Considering the status quo of education and specific conditions in China, weproposed a revised “relative risk aversion” theory in which “relative risk aversion”and credential inflation are mostly based on the comparison with the correspondingsocio-economic status and value of education for the previous school-age group.According to “relative risk aversion” theory, by constructing a credential inflationfactor, we found changes in the value of diploma of two different education levels indifferent age groups.The second part of our analysis is to study the factors that affect educationalopportunities for children on both the macro and micro levels. We found that ifparents acquired a high school education, children’s educational strategies are moresusceptible to the information of credential inflation in the labor market.“relative riskaversion” theory is proven in our study that if credential inflation happens, it’s morelikely that children will pursue the next level education. On the macro level, We focuson analysis of the changes of effect that the parental education, socio-economic status,individual living area and gender disparities have on educational opportunities after“the great expansion of college education” in1999.Our finding is consistent with"MMI" hypothesis, the great expansion of college education doesn’t reduce theinequalities in social classes, areas, and genders.