Selection among the most talented? Chinese students in tertiary education in China, Germany and the UK

• In Event: The consequences of educational upgrading: persisting inequalities?

Proposal

International education (IE) is often posited with privileged social background (Brooks & Waters 2011; Gerhards & Hans 2013), reinforcing class distinctions and social advantages (Findlay et al. 2012). While such a view points to selectivity on observable characteristics among international students, less known is whether there is also unobservable selectivity (such as selection on individual traits and self-identification) that might corroborate with the findings of this literature.

In this paper we analyze selectivity in IE using the “Bright Futures” dataset (“A Comparative Study of Internal and International Mobility of Chinese Higher Education Students”, funded jointly by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, German Research Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China), a unique source of high-quality representative data of Chinese international students in the UK and Germany together with representative samples of British and Chinese natives in the UK and China. Concentrating on an already selected segment of the British and Chinese populations (students currently enrolled in tertiary education) our paper seeks to confirm if selection on the basis of unobservables actually takes place. According to the theoretical argumentation dominating the literature on selectivity we look at two sources of selection: The first block refers to observable characteristics such as socioeconomic background – which we measure estimating the probability for the students’ father having a high-status occupation (professionals, technical occupations and high administrators) and parental education (whether parents are university graduates). Secondly, we look at a number of unobservable characteristics, measured as self-reported identification with a statement on being an agentic and ambitious individual (e.g. being creative, giving importance to risk taking and success, and taking own decisions). Students with such agentic traits are posited to achieve success in labor markets and in relation to overall life goals, especially in recent neoliberal contexts.

Our findings indicate contrary workings of selectivity in IE. While we find moderate to strong selection by social background, there is no evidence of selection on the basis of unobservables. International education might signal social positioning due to social background, however, in terms of individual traits that are highly rewarded in labor markets and beyond it is not linked with an additional advantage. We argue that higher education students world over are exposed to standardized models of the agentic and ambitious individual. Such models of the individual are transmitted through scientific theories and ideologies of education, and are part of school curricula and programs increasingly in Asia as well (Soysal & Wong 2015), creating expectations and equipping individuals with such narratives of the self-independent of their location.

Authors

• Yasemin Soysal, University of Essex

• Hector Cebolla Boado, UNED, Madrid