Cultural capital and the college admission system in China

Abstract

Studies find persisting urban-rural disparities in college access over the course of China’s “massification” of higher education. Since the turn of the century, China introduced policies to provide financial support and remove economic barrier to rural students’ attainment of a higher education. Yet, the policies have had rather limited impact on increasing rural students’ disproportionately low presence in prestigious universities. The research is based on fieldwork from a rural community in Henan province. It examine both the role of preferential admission policies that add points to exam scores of rural and minority families, as well as the role of differentiated forms of Chinese cultural capital in access to higher education. The paper collects documentary data on these preferential admission results over the past five years, and interview data from teachers about their standards for marking college entrance examinations. This paper argues that there are selective norms for college admission in China that explain how students are selected, eliminated, relegated and deferred based on their family backgrounds.