The Baoyan Fever at Top Chinese Universities and Its Heterogeneous Impacts over Different Student Bodies

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

Proposal

China is witnessing unprecedented demand for postgraduate degrees among its undergraduates, primarily due to a highly competitive graduate labour market. In the top-tier universities, an increasing majority of students seek to qualify for test-free early admission schemes into postgraduate programmes (known as Baoyan), which heavily depends on their cumulative GPA rankings. Those who fail have to compete fiercely in the National Entrance Examinations for Master’s Programmes, which attracted over five million attendees in 2022 alone. The Baoyan fever has been documented both by scholarship and media. But little has been discussed about its impacts upon undergraduate experiences at the top universities, let alone any potential structured (dis)advantages it might create for different student bodies.

Based on over 200 in-depth interviews with third- and fourth-year undergraduates at one of China’s highest ranked universities, this study found 1) a majority of the participants attached utility-oriented, market-based value to postgraduate education and regarded Baoyan a relatively easy path; 2) they usually planned academic and extracurricular activities with the sole goal of securing postgraduate admission and many felt ‘forced’ into over-heated competition with peers, which left them limited chance and low motivation for other ‘useless’ experiences, 3) although the success rate of Baoyan was not low, disappointment at undergraduate experience was widespread among the participants, who commonly predicated the fever not to cease in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, this study found the Baoyan fever affected rural and first-generation undergraduates in distinctly different ways than their more privileged counterparts, which might have resulted in further accumulation of their disadvantages already extensively discussed by sociology of education literature. Due to their unfamiliarity with college life and opportunity maps, rural and first-generation undergraduates tended to be late-comers for Baoyan preparations and were more strongly inclined to consider Baoyan with regards to vague, often unexamined market value of postgraduate degrees and advice from close networks. They rarely expressed any authentic interest in academic trainings or made any substantial link between postgraduate studies and their roughly imagined future careers. Also, because these students often spent much longer time adapting to the academic challenges in college, they were set at disadvantage in cumulative GPA rankings and thus in most Baoyan schemes. The fact that, once aiming for Baoyan, these students were far more likely to constrain themselves to academic work and avoid other extracurricular or professional exposures further limited their undergraduate experience and space for all-rounded growth.

The ever-increasing Baoyan fever at top universities sets a particular and important context for researching contemporary undergraduate education in China. The worrying findings above show that Baoyan has shed shadow over the undergraduate experiences for a majority of students at an elite institution and, in the meanwhile, created distinctly unfavourable situations for rural and first-generation undergraduates. Such devastating impacts must be studied thoroughly so as to seek effective counter measures towards all-rounded education and justice. Lastly, this study calls for future research to conduct more systematic examinations over institutionalised contexts and specific mechanisms for differentiated experiences among diverse student bodies in Chinese universities.

Author

• Ying Ma, Fudan University