Cultural capital and access to higher education: a comparative analysis of Canada and China

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Higher education SIG roundtable 2

Proposal

This paper is a comparative analysis between Canada and China’s education system examining access to higher education (HE). A comparative analysis is used to show how cultural capital continues to be a relevant tool to examine mechanisms of inequality across different cultures and societies within education systems. Higher education attainment in Canada has one of the highest rates internationally, with the second most tertiary-educated adults aged 25-34 (60%) (OECD, 2017). In light of this, inequalities between students in accessing HE continue to exist in different ways within the Canadian education system. Similarly, enrolment rate in China’s HE system has increased from under 4 percent to over 20 percent of the age cohort since the 1990s (Li & Lowe, 2016, p. 22). This reach to mass higher education levels, driven from government policy, market demand, activism of local governments, and self-interests of HE institutions, resulted in a stratified higher education system (Wu & Robinson, 2016, p. 39).

Expansion of higher education systems do not necessarily reduce class inequalities in access to elite higher education and career outcomes (Marginson, 2016, p. 10). This is because higher education (HE) can be seen as a “positional good” with unequal starting positions (Marginson, 2016, p. 3); one concept put forth to explain differences in student academic achievement between social classes is cultural capital by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Cultural capital encompasses knowledge, behaviours and skills that are designated by society as being valuable (Bourdieu, 1977, as cited in DiMaggio, 1982, p. 190) and is viewed as being passed down from parents to children, where resources typically provide an advantage to students (DiMaggio, 1982, p. 190). Through a comparative analysis of HE access in Canada and China, I argue that the following forms of cultural capital are relevant and critical in access to higher education within both countries: knowledge of the HE process and programs, expectation/aspiration to attend HE, and knowledge of the skills and behaviours valued within the HE system.

The paper is organized in the following: unpacking Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital and how the concept has been developed and applied in current societies; overview and comparison of Canadian and Chinese education systems focusing on access to HE from high school; describing the mechanisms of cultural capital in the Chinese and Canadian contexts where the three forms of cultural capital outlined in the paper emerge as the most relevant in facilitating access to higher education. I describe how these three forms of cultural capital are crucial in helping students access higher education relative to the different education and political systems of Canada and China. For both Canadian and Chinese students, this means accessing competitive fields of study and competitive HE institutions that are disproportionately composed of students who have obtained high levels of these forms of cultural capital. The present comparative analysis can inform education policies around high school curriculum structures and can guide further research on equitable intervention programs in the K-12 system that would help students from low-cultural capital backgrounds access HE.

Author

• Ceara Khoramshahi, University of Toronto