On The Relationship Between Social Capital And Stratification And Competition For Excellent Students

With the social development, social mobility becomes more and more intensified and the social stratification is much more distinct. Social stratification has become an important feature of modern society. The establishment of a reasonable social structure, to a large extent, relies on a healthy and reasonable social mobility. In modern society, achieved factors have become the most important factors in the rise of the social status of social members. Education is an important and major way for social members to obtain first-class achieved factors, so it has become a kind of scarce resource. In the fierce competition for education, a difference between Key Higher Education Institutes (HEI) and Ordinary Degree Level HEIs occurs, which leads to the striving for the outstanding students among schools. Faced with the pressure of graduation rate, the key HEIs and ordinary degree level HEIs strive for the outstanding students. In the perspective of social stratification and social capital, this thesis discusses the issue of striving for outstanding students by taking the striving for students in Y city an example.From the perspective of social stratification, during the differentiation between the key HEIs and ordinary level HEIs, the key HEIs are well-positioned and attract more and more outstanding students. Students of different social stratifications are not in the same educational environment. Each social stratification has its own lifestyle, household income and social capital, and those gaps become wider, which leads to a difference in children’s qualification of getting higher education.From the perspective of social capital, the operation of social capital is hidden behind the ordinary places of daily education. There is a difference the key HEIs and ordinary level HEIs in terms of social capital. The key HEIs have more social capital, and is well-positioned in the striving for better students.The striving for students is manly to strive for students from households of well-positioned stratifications. The stronger groups take advantage of their preponderant resources and help their children get education of good quality, which will intensify their strengths; as a result, the weak groups are usually at a disadvantage in education. Institutes’ striving for outstanding students among schools actually intensifies the competition mechanism, which aggravates inequity of educational resources and distribution. It can be seen that invisible social capital produces unequal opportunity of educationThrough the discussion and analysis of the influences of social stratification and social capital on the striving for outstanding students, this thesis holds the view that the schools have unbalanced accesses to resources due to their different social stratifications, which leads to the flow of outstanding students towards key HEIs. The striving for students further strengthens the well-positioned stratifications and maintains their social. capital, and leads to different levels of students and the differentiations of schools.