Gender, institution type and access to doctoral education: based on a national survey of Chinese master students

• In Event: Master’s education in east Asia: access, learning, and employment

Proposal

Access to higher education is a classic issue in the sociology of higher education (Karen, 2002). Traditionally, scholars have focused on the issue of admission opportunities at the undergraduate level. In recent years, scholars have become more aware of the role of postgraduate education in social stratification (Posselt & Grodsky,2017), and have therefore begun to pay more attention to access to postgraduate education (Posselt, et al, 2017). However, there are few studies that analyze this issue at the level of doctoral education. This article uses the 2016 national master's graduate survey data to analyze this issue and focus on the impact of gender and institution type on access to doctoral education.
The survey was conducted for the master students who are graduated at 2016. In the selection of survey samples, this round of surveys is set up for cluster sampling by institutions. In the end, 17 universities returned to the questionnaire, covering “985 project Universities”, “211 project Universities”, “non-211 project Universities” and other different types of colleges and universities in different regions such as the East and West. A total of 11,329 valid questionnaires were collected.
The study found that more than 10% of graduate students who graduated in 2016 would choose to pursue their doctoral degrees, and gender factors and colleges selectivity will significantly affect students’ choice of doctoral education. The gender effect in medicine is the most prominent, and the impact of college type on science and medical science is more obvious. Further analysis shows that compared to men, women are more likely to be subject to age constraints when choosing to doctoral education, and are also more susceptible to the satisfaction of the mentor. Previous research has shown that good teaching behavior (such as timely feedback, close interaction with teachers, etc.) is significantly positively correlated with college graduates’ graduate education expectation. Similarly, this study also found that educational behaviors and effects have an impact on the choice of master students for doctoral study. However, unlike the existing research, we find that there is a gender difference in this effect. Compared with men, female master students are more influenced by their educational experience (satisfaction with academic supervision) when choosing whether to enroll doctoral program or not.
Comparing the choices study abroad, it is found that men are more likely to have doctoral education in China, graduates with “211” for undergraduate colleges or “985” for master’s colleges are more likely to study abroad and the outstanding master graduates in colleges and universities are not attractive enough.
With the expansion of doctoral education, the quality of doctoral education has become an issue of great concern. How to attract outstanding graduates who are suitable for Ph.D. and choose to pursue a doctoral degree is a prerequisite for improving the quality of doctoral education. The study thus has import policy implication for the equality and quality of higher education. On the theoretical level, this paper shows that researchers should pay more attention to the influence of age and academic supervision satisfaction on women's access to doctoral education.

Authors

• Wenqin Shen, Peking University

• Lingyu Liu, Peking University