The Influence of Family Background on the Access to Doctoral Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Higher education SIG roundtable 5

Proposal

The long-lasting impact of family background on the development of personal education has been proven many times (Sewell & Featherman, 1977; Erikson, 2007; Mullen, 2003; Bachsleitner et al., Becher, & Marko 2018). This influence plays a central role in transmitting social unfairness across generations in different countries (Boudon, 1974; Illich, 1983; Erikson & Rudolphi, 2010). According to the social reproduction theory that education is a position for class-reproduction, therefore traditional elite will constantly increase investment in education and extend the educational process in order to maintain their social privileges, which shows their exclusivity (Bourdieu, 1984). Family background will continue inequality in the postgraduate education enrollment stage (Mullen, 2003; Zhonglu, 2016). However, some studies suggest that the higher education students receive, the more homogenous they become. The influence of selective system become dominant while family background is weakened (Mare, 1980; Boundon, 1974), especially in postgraduate education. Since it is an important stage of training talent, the criteria for admission are mainly academic achievement, instead of family background (Stoltenberg, 1994). As an important way for training professional talents, what is the impact of family background on the access to doctoral education for graduates? How about the impact mechanism? At present, there are relatively few studies at home and abroad in this field. The results of foreign scholars mostly indicate that the family background will affect the access (Jaksztat, 2014; Mullen, 2003; Bachsleiner, 2018), while domestic research is very scarce (Dongping, 2006; Zhonglu, 2016; Wei & Qian, 2009). According to the statistics of China's Ministry of Education, in 2016, the total number of doctorate candidates in China was 342,200, ranking the first in the world. It is of great individual and social significance to examine the issue of access to doctoral education based on a view of social inequality. Therefore, this article takes China as an example to explore the relationship between family background and graduate students’ choice in pursuing doctoral studies, and draw on the primary and secondary effects proposed by Bound (Bound, 1974) to analyze the mechanism behind the differences in family background. This article uses the data of the “Graduate Training Quality Feedback and Tracking Survey” commissioned by the Department of Degree Management and Postgraduate Education of China's Ministry of Education in 2017. The data covers 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China, covering 95 colleges and universities in different regions, including different types of colleges and universities, and a total of 25,763 valid questionnaires for academic masters. Among them, 19.31% graduates chose to continue to pursue doctoral degrees, and 4.5% students chose to finish PHD education in foreign countries. Among the students who chose to continue the doctoral education, 18.31% parents did not receive higher education, 21.20% parents had at least one college education, and up to 32.82% parents had at least one graduate education. The graduate students with high education parents had a high quality school experience, outstanding academic research interests, and a high proportion of arts, social sciences and business field. However, there is no significant difference in academic performance between groups with different family backgrounds. In order to further explore the influence of family background on the transition doctoral education and the mechanism behind it, this paper applies logit regression model and KHB method to achieve multivariate analysis. The study found that family background, academic performance, motivation for study, and type of institution all have a significant impact on the choice of graduate students to access their doctoral education. Compared with students whose parents have not received higher education, at least one parents with a university degree can increase the probability of students accessing to doctoral degree by 0.27 percentage points, and at least one parents with a master's degree can increase by 0.96 percentage points. The indirect effects of family backgrounds mediated by academic performance, institution type, research field and research motivation are 0.06 percentage points and 0.11 percentage points, which is the primary effect of family background, accounting for only 22% and 11% of the total effect. Among them, the mediation effect of the research motivation (99.46%, 81.54%) and the research field (52.84%, 31.02%) is outstanding. Factors such as institution type and academic performance did not significantly reduce the impact of family background on the access to doctoral education. The family background still had a major impact at the doctoral education. Different from previous studies (Schindler, 2016; Bachsleitner et al., 2018), the influence mechanism of family background is mainly achieved by influencing students' academic motivation and research field choice.

Author

• Lingyu Liu, Peking University