Towards a General Theory of Education-Based Inequality and Mobility: Who Wins and Loses Under China’s Educational Expansion, 1981-2010

Abstract

My dissertation formally develops a theory of education-based inequality and mobility to integrate the existing theoretical accounts and results in the fields. The empirical puzzle I examine is why the triangle associations among social origin, educational attainment and social destination present various patterns in different societies under educational expansion. By using a variety of cross-sectional survey data from reforming China, I illustrate that class mobility strategies, structural and institutional features in the educational system and the sociopolitical institutional context are the most important dimensions to understand how educational expansion affects education-based social stratification and inequality. My analyses demonstrate that, with China’s “bottleneck” educational opportunity structure and rising educational cost under educational expansion, we observe increasing educational inequality, declining social mobility and increasing social origin differentials in the college premium in the last three decades.