No Evidence Supports the New “Useless Education Theory”: Analyses of Chinese Parents’ Educational Aspirations

• In Event: Understanding the Now and the Future: Parental Cognitions About Child Development, Education, and Rearing

Abstract

Chinese parents value education and consider it as the path to upward social mobility. They have been known to make considerable personal sacrifices to educate children. However, it has been argued that parents in China today embrace a “useless education theory” (Xie, 2019). Simply put, it is assumed that contemporary Chinese parents question the extent to which tertiary education will bestow skills that make their children employable. This paper examined the speculations about the existence of the “useless education theory” by investigating Chinese parents’ educational aspirations for children based on data from a large, nationally representative sample.
Educational aspirations refer to the ideal level of educational attainment that parents hope their children will achieve (Khattab, 2015). As a facet of parental cognition, they are socially determined and individual-specific (Fruttero et al., 2021). Notably, inequalities in educational aspirations may lead to vicious cycles of intergenerational poverty because such inequalities notoriously prevent underprivileged groups from striving to improve their situation through education.
We leveraged data from the China Family Panel Study, a longitudinal social survey conducted with Chinese families. We limited our sample to families with children from birth to 6 years because children do not have test scores in this phase. As such, parents’ educational aspirations are unlikely to be influenced by children’s present academic performance but most likely to reflect parents’ own conceptions regarding children’s future educational attainment considering the concurrent social context. Surveyed biennially from 2014 to 2020, a total of 15,275 participants were included in our analyses. We transformed educational aspirations into expected years of schooling and examined the temporal trend of this construct across the four waves of assessments. We expected that if Chinese parents hold the “useless education theory” viewpoint, they would aspire for lower education attainment for their children over time. We also examined inequalities in educational aspirations in relation to region, urbanicity, family socioeconomic status (SES), and gender differences. Moreover, we investigated how between-family variations in perceptions of the present life, optimism towards the future, and future education plans possibly explain inequalities in educational aspirations (Fruttero et al., 2021).
Contrary to our expectation, a modest increase was found on educational aspirations from 2014 to 2020, mainly driven by an increasing proportion of parents who hope their children to attain college or university degrees (Figure 1). Region and gender differences in educational aspirations decreased over time. Family SES gaps in educational aspirations remained significant but progressively decreased. Urbanicity variations in educational aspirations persisted in favor of urban families. In Table 1, perceived current social issues and subjective SES partially explained these inequalities in educational aspirations. Optimism towards the future and the plan to have the child study abroad partially explained the inequalities in educational aspirations.
In conclusion, this research finds no support for “useless education theory” but demonstrates rising educational aspirations among Chinese families. While gaps in educational aspirations have narrowed for several inequality indicators, urban-rural variations persist. Present- and future-oriented parental cognitions serve as the underlying mechanisms that affect inequalities in educational aspirations.

Authors

• Shuyang Dong, University of Hong Kong (HKU)
  Presenting Author

• Yi Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Nirmala Rao, The University of Hong Kong (HKU)