Contentious Complicity: How Supplemental Education Affects the Formal Schooling of US-bound Chinese Students

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 16. Education, Habitus, & Cultural Capital

Abstract

Does supplementary education supplement schooling? Existing research emphasizes that supplemental education offers an educational advantage on top of schooling, translating class advantage or immigrant heritage into superior college admission outcomes. Taking an institutional perspective instead of an individual-level one, I examine the impacts of popular adoption of supplemental education on formal schooling, a site of collective learning and socialization. I draw from an ethnographic study of a study abroad program preparing Chinese students for US college admission within an elite Chinese public school, where the majority of students hired zhongjies, or private college consultants outside the formal educational system, to compete for elite American colleges. I argue that zhongjies, a major player of the private industry of supplemental education, form a simultaneously antagonistic and complicit relation with the school. Representing a private model of education, they compete with the public model practiced by the school, despite sharing the goal of facilitating college admission. And the private model often manages to gain the upper hand, subjecting students with and without zhongjies to inferior schooling experiences. I identify four processes through which students’ reliance on zhongjies undermines schooling: hollowing out classroom learning at school, fostering students’ dependency on zhongjies for self-presentation in applications, pitting students against the school in publicity campaigns, and alienating students from each other by amplifying a hierarchy of college potentials. I demonstrate the reluctant complicity of the school that sustains the popularity of zhongjies and the contention between supplemental education and formal schooling. This study contributes to education literature by identifying institutional-level mechanisms through which market practices of supplemental education interact with school activities. By studying China, where supplemental education has long been normalized, it also contributes to understanding and anticipating the ramifications of a similar pattern taking shape in the US.

Author

• Kaiting Zhou, University of California-Los Angeles