School Continuation after Compulsory Education in China and Taiwan

• In Event: 069 - Section on Asia and Asian America Paper Session. New Frontiers in Stratification and Inequality

Abstract

School continuation after compulsory education is an early critical transition in the lives of children because this transition implicates the eventual educational attainment and socioeconomic status in adulthood. This critical transition is also a significant barometer of a society’s inequality of educational opportunity because the transition results from not only family background, but also school institution, be it an opportunity equalizer or an inequality reproducer. Past research takes this transition as a condition rather than an objective and focuses on social class with little attention to school institution. This paper fill in the gaps by examining the role of both the family and school institutions. To further our understanding we take a comparative perspective, which can offer invaluable insight that a single-society study ultimately misses. The two societies exhibit opposite trends of social inequality – soaring in China and declining then stably low in Taiwan. Under these divergent social inequality trends, it is possible that the school institution plays a different role between the two societies. We apply theories of social stratification and sociology of education to derive testable hypotheses to be tested in society-specific analyses and harmonized joint analyses using comparable student cohort surveys. Methodologically we address the potential selection bias arising from school choice using latent class modeling to enhance the causal inferences of our modeling.

Authors

• Lingxin Hao, Johns Hopkins University

• Shirley Michelle Lung