Higher Education and Family Background: Which Really Matters to Individual’s Socioeconomic Status Development in China Abstract: The study found that the higher education and parents’ occupations both have a significant impact to individual’s social economic development measured by ISEI (International Socioeconomic Index), but higher education’s impact is greater. In addition, from 1980s to 2000s, the impact of higher education has been diminishing as the access to higher education increased significantly. Data also shows that certain sectors, such as government employees, Chinese Communist Party members, city/urban households, had a clear advantage. To our surprise, gender and minority status had no statistical difference in ISEI. Several policies were recommended to break the social stratification in the near future. Key Words: Social Stratification in China since 1980s, Higher Education and Occupation, Family Background and Occupation, Heckman’s Two-Stage Sampling, OLS Model, Rural Residence and Social Mobility. Highlights: • Higher education has a positive and significant effect on individual’s International Socioeconomic Index (ISEI) of groups born from 1960s to 1980s in China, but the effect declines over time. • The original family also has significant effect on individual’s ISEI, but the effect is much smaller than that of higher education. • Although the higher education has been much more accessible since late 1990s, the rural residents ISEI is much lower than that of city/urban residents, while communist party members, government employees, and Eastern China region residents enjoy a premium. • Gender and minority status have no statistical differences in ISEI in this study. 1 1. Introduction As the father of American public-school system, Horace Mann stated in 1848: “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” Historically, education is one of the most important weapons to break the barrier of social stratification in many societies including China. Education, especially higher education has improved social economic status for people in many countries since the World War II. However, the family background is also an important factor in social economic status. A unique Chinese family background is the registered residence system (Hukou 戶口 in Chinese), which identifies everyone’s place of origin. Chinese registered residence is always the same as their parents, regardless of the actual birthplaces. Most people can only receive public education, medical care, and government jobs in their registered residence places. The registered residence is very difficult to change in China, except going to colleges and a few other limited ways. The modern Chinese higher education started in 1977 when the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE, or Gaokao 高考 in Chinese) was reinstated. The Chinese higher education was tuition free from 1977- 1997, and all students were heavily subsidized by the Chinese government for their campus living cost. This opened an important channel for physical and social mobility. Higher education’s impact on social mobility has been a research topic for the last 30 years (Bian, 2002; Li, 1997; Li, 2002; Lu, 2008; Yeung, 2013; Hu and Hibel, 2014; and Hu and Hibel, 2015). But the degree of impact of the higher education compared to family 2 background, and the changes of the higher education’s impact in three distinct decades in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are rarely studied. This study has two main research questions: (1) Which matters more to an individual’s social economic status: family background, or higher education? (2) Has the impact of higher education on individual social economic status changed from 1980s to 2010s when the higher education in China evolved from highly selective to much more accessible? The following parts of this study are as follows: The second part illustrates the standard for social stratification and the method for measuring one’s socioeconomic status based on occupations; the third part puts forward two hypotheses based on literature review and reiterate the original research questions; the fourth part introduces the sources of data, samples and construction of models; the fifth part presents the results of this empirical study; and the sixth part is the conclusion and the limitations. 2. Social Stratification in China and International Socioeconomic Index Based on Occupations The classical work related to social stratification and occupational achievement includes Blau and Duncan’s status attainment model in a 1967 study and they found that 20% of one’s occupational achievements are related to family backgrounds, 80% to other factors including individuals’ efforts and education level. Other scholars took the pragmatic approach and added intermediary factors to Blau and Duncan’s model. For example, Sewell (1970) added such variables as personal IQ, expectations, ambition, academic achievement, and parental 3 encouragement for participation in the higher education. Turner (1960) studied cohorts on sponsored mobility via the mass education system. There are also studies on career advancement in communist countries. Walder (1995) argued that both education and political credentials were needed for career advancement in China to receive “high prestige, considerable authority and clear material privileges,” education alone will only bring high prestige but not material privileges and authority. Szelenyi (1976) and Walder (1985) argued that the social inequity was mainly due to state redistribution mechanism in the Soviet and its Eastern European allies, and it was quite different from the Western market economy. The constructivist scholars represented by Pierre Bourdieu (1977) classify three resources that determine the "social stratification" into economic, cultural, and social capital. In his view, what causes social stratification in his native country France was economic and cultural capital in the first place, while social capital plays a secondary role. The research by Chinese scholar Li (1997) revealed that cultural capital had a cumulative effect upon academic achievement and socioeconomic status attainment. A Chinese American scholar Zhou (2014) proposed a four- capital theory in social stratification. In addition to economic, cultural, and social capitals, Zhou added a fourth—the political capital, which was defined as the individual or group’s ability to influence public policies. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in the 1960s built up African American’s political capital in the United States to redress the “racial stratification”. In 2008 the African American’s political capital helped Obama to become the first African American President, which was unimaginable in 1960s. In China and Soviet Unions, members of the communist party clearly had the political capital and typically enjoyed a career advancement premium as in studies from Szelenyi (1976) and Walder (1985). 4 Carnoy and Levin (1985) put forward the view that education can break the barriers and provide the upward mobility for the disadvantaged. Becker and Tomes (1986), develops a model of the transmission of earnings, assets, and consumption from parents to descendants based on number of empirical studies for different countries. They found that almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations. Becker’s later concluded that human competence, i.e. human capital, and the consequences of investments in human competence, would be a key of children’s future earnings. In 1992, Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics for his contribution to human-capital- earnings functions. In summary, social stratification is determined by the ability of individuals and their families of origin. Different from some existing researches on the impact of higher education or family backgrounds in China (Li, 1997; Lu, 2008; Yeung, 2013; Hu and Hibel, 2014; and Hu and Hibel, 2015), this study measures the impact of higher education on socioeconomic status for population born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Since Chinese college population of 17-24 years old has been a much more homogeneous group than most Western countries, these three decades population correspond to college graduates in three distinct time periods, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The Chinese college acceptance rate was 8% in 1980, while in 2019, the rate was 62% (China Historical College Acceptance Rate since 1977, 2020). The Chinese higher education went from highly selective to mass in just 30 years. The comparative study of three different distinct decades is a unique feature that previous studies did not address. Since 1949, the new Chinese government has implemented a series of socialist reforms, which led to massive re-shuffling in the social status of all Chinese. It is generally agreed upon that the socioeconomic status was mainly depended on family’s political affiliation and has little or even negative association with higher education from 1949-1976. In 1977, China reinstated 5 the National College Entrance Examination for people from all family background and started market-based economy. In the next 40 years, the social classes characterized by occupation have gradually formed in China. As Chinese scholar Bian (2002) pointed out that social classes are not easily defined in China, and Chinese had very little inherited wealth before 1980s, but the occupation is clearly identified in Chinese