Does Higher Education in China Help to Change Rural Female’s Disadvantaged Status? -An Analysis Based on Chinese College Student Survey

• In Event: Gender and social transformation

Proposal

Gender discrimination is a long-standing problem in most countries in the world. Gender studies in higher education help to promote women’s social status, for higher education is regarded as an important channel from which women obtain equal rights to education and employment as men. Employing large-scale quantitative student survey data in China, this paper hopes to give some inspirations to global gender equality.
Apart from common ground in gender problem with other countries, gender equality in education is an even more complicated issue in China. Rural female becomes absolutely disadvantaged group because of long-time practiced household registration policy and great gap in economics and educational resources between urban and rural areas, while urban female seems to be the biggest beneficiary in expansion of higher education. Therefore, this paper tries to depict how the real inferior group, Chinese rural female students, perform in college, especially their disadvantages in receiving higher education, and analyze primary reasons resulting in these disadvantages.
Through this paper, the author hopes to offer practical solutions to some key issues in not only China, but also similar contexts. For theoretical aspect, focusing on rural female college students, helps to verify whether one of the most disadvantaged group can improve their status and life through higher education; it also helps to know to what extent higher education functions in human capital development, especially for those inferior ones. For practical aspect, analyzing rural female college students’ characteristics and disadvantages in higher education process, is an early step to make targeted and useful policies to help them, which is a sure way to achieve gender equality and final social fairness.
To realize these purpose, the author raises three progressive questions about rural female’s education experiences. First, what are the pre-college characteristics of rural female students? Second, what are the advantages and disadvantages of rural female in higher education? Third, given insights from the second question, does higher education help to change rural female’s disadvantaged status? All the analysis is under the framework of family cultural capital theory and gender socialization theory.
Originality of this paper reflects in two aspects. In content, this paper focuses on education process, namely, academic performance and learning outcome, which is usually neglected in other domestic research. In methodology, instead of social survey data, the author employs targeted educational survey data, through which deeper discussion to their performance could be made.
This research is based on the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) 2016, a nationwide large-scale tracking survey led by Professor Shi Jinghuan. The survey uses random sampling method and the total sample size for this research is 50656. To clarify different subject groups distinctively, the author defines the difference between rural and urban areas in two dimensions: (a) whether living in the rural area before going to college and (b) whether having rural household registration (Hukou). Then one experimental group (rural female) together with three control groups (rural male, urban female and urban male) are set up.
Based on research questions, main findings could be divided into three parts. The first part helps to get whole picture of rural female’ pre-college characteristics, offering basis for further discussion. Statistics show that rural female has great disadvantages in many aspects, including family background, pre-college learning experience, as well as college entrance examination experience and major choosing. Although they work very hard to change their disadvantaged status, weakness brought by family origin and gender discrimination can hardly be diminished.
In the second and third part of data analysis, indicators reflecting students’ learning behavior and outcome are introduced. These indicators are designed upon George Kuh’s student engagement theory and Chinese higher education environment. They include three levels: learning process, learning style and learning outcome. With this framework, the author employs descriptive analysis and simple linear regression to answer the last two research questions.
Data indicate that rural female show significant weakness in many indicators, especially for extra-class learning, integrative learning, enriching educational experiences and self-report learning outcome. While institution satisfaction remains the only strength. Considering the more advantaged urban female group, rural female’s disadvantages are even more obvious.
In conclusion, rural female, compared with other groups, suffers from college admission mechanism before entering college (Liu & Wang, 2008). And nothing changes when they ultimately struggle to make it. Though they still work hard as before and get remarkable grades, learning outcome reported by them remains the lowest. On one hand, they are really good at traditional learning style acquired in previous experience. While on the other, communication and multiple learning skills become their shortcoming.
Aim of this research is to uncover mysterious black box in higher education process, to verify whether it helps to achieve gender equality, to offer more helpful guidance to rural female in college and to enlighten realization of full-scale social fairness. As previous literature shows, rural female does manage to go to college, expecting to change their personal life through higher education. But there seems no difference, for biased social gender image and dual urban-rural structure still remains. However, based on this paper, people can know more about rural female’s suffering and struggling, and then more targeted help could be offered to change rural female’s disadvantaged status in education. Although this paper is just a preliminary attempt, the author wants to make contributions to promote higher education equality worldwide.

Authors

• Ruilin Li, Institute of Education Tsinghua University

• Wenting Lan, Tsinghua University/visiting in University of Michigan

• Liang Li, Tsinghua University