Intergenerational Persistence in Postsocialist China: 1999 Higher Education Expansion, Educational Trends, and Heterogeneity of their Impacts

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1. Perspectives on Inequality in China

Abstract

Children of parents with high-status occupations often end up working in high-status occupations, while their peers whose parents have low-status jobs often end up in low-status jobs. Education plays a pivotal and multifaceted role in this relative intergenerational occupation persistence. Rapid social and educational change in China, and especially the 1999 Higher Education Expansion, may have produced changes in education's role(s) in intergenerational persistence. I hypothesize that stratified higher education and occupation outcomes in the population may have strengthened intergenerational persistence, while growing percentages of college graduates, for whom occupational attainment tends to depend less on social origin, may have weakened persistence. Analyzing data from eleven waves of the Chinese General Social Survey, I first confirm that intergenerational occupation persistence in China remained stable between the 1964-1979 and 1980-1995 birth cohorts. Next, model-based simulations suggest that changes in: 1). the association between parents' occupation status and children's educational attainment had little effect on persistence; 2). the correlation between children's education and adulthood occupation status decreased persistence; 3). the group persistence among people with the same education increased persistence; and 4). the shares of the population in different education groups had little effect. While these results suggest that overall cross-cohort stability in intergenerational occupation persistence resulted from offsetting contributions of these four educational processes, the specific estimated contributions are different from hypothetical expectations. One key reason behind such disagreements must be the heterogeneous impacts of the educational processes on different education groups, which may be fundamentally because of the rural-urban divide in China.

Author

• Haorui Peng, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor