The Making of Rural Students’ Low University Aspirations in China

• In Event: Rural Students, Education and Social Mobility in China

Proposal

In contemporary China, rural students still depend heavily upon university degrees, particularly those earned from elite universities, to climb up the social ladder. Although growing numbers of rural youths have been admitted to universities, they are overwhelmingly allocated to low-tier universities. In order to understand rural students’ low educational achievements (including their inferior university access), many recent studies have paid close attention to rural students’ educational aspirations (e.g., Hou, 2018; Huang, 2017; Li & Hu, 2021; Wu & Huang, 2016; Xie, Bai, Li & Liu, 2022). This paper grapples with the seemingly self-evident explanation that rural students received inferior university access due to their low educational aspirations.

Guided by Bourdieu’s theoretical insights of habitus, this paper discloses how the low educational aspirations of rural students were inculcated in certain unfavorable yet permeable socio-cultural conditions. Habitus in this paper is interpreted as “a structured and structuring structure” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 171), and employed to explore the dialectics between rural students’ low university aspirations and their miserable college access. In specific, this paper investigates how rural students’ low aspirations were consciously or unconsciously inculcated by the actualized university access of those in similar socio-cultural conditions, i.e., family members, fellow villagers, and previous graduates of their schools. This paper employed two sources of data: 1) a longitudinal ethnography conducted in the Lark High School where almost all students were recruited from rural families between 2013 and 2014; 2) educational autobiographies developed by rural students at a non-elite university in west China between 2021 and 2023.

Despite their excellent academic records before entering high school and their longing for upward mobility, rural students in the study seldom developed ambitious university aspirations. The frustrated university aspirations of these rural students were fostered primarily by their immersion in an unfavorable situation where few, if not none, of their family members and fellow villagers were actually admitted to prestigious programs. Thanks to the pre-selection through zhongkao (high school entrance examination), these rural students were further frustrated by their attendance at county-seat high schools where few graduates in previous cohorts actually entered prestigious programs. Evidences suggest that foiled expectations of rural parents and teachers, which contributed to preventing rural students from aiming high, were largely produced from the actualized inferior college access of these reference groups.

Despite the disturbing correspondence between rural students’ low university admissions and their inferior university access, the theoretical insights of habitus contribute to challenging the paradoxical self-fulfilling prophecy. Actually, reducing the poor university access of rural students to their low aspirations effectively sustained rural students’ belief in the seemingly meritocratic selection of university applicants, and concealed the real obstacles on rural students' way to prestigious universities. In order to understand why rural students continued to have poor university access, further studies have to follow the footsteps of Jerome Karabel (2005) and Joseph Soares (2007) and call into question the very meaning of merit overly or covertly defined by gaokao (university entrance examination).

Author

• Xiaoliang Li, Northwest Normal University