Rong was born in Shanghai. Both of his parents have bachelorâs degrees. His dad works as a senior director in a global top-500 company. His mother is a corporate lawyer. He attended the most prestigious high school in Shanghai and many of his classmates went abroad for college. Rong had gone to London for a semester as an exchange student during high school, butânot appreciating the food and weather in Englandâhe decided to attend college in China. He chose to attend Wuhai University (WU) because it was his parentsâ wish; they were alumni and it was close to home. Rong had been visiting WU since childhood, so the campus was familiar. Nor was the teaching style foreign to him. âMy high school had the same teaching style as this university,â he said, âso it is not at all difficult for me to get used to study here. Now I have much more freedom to choose the courses that really interest me and can help me to launch a good career.â He came to the college with clear expectations about his future. He admired Steve Jobs and Elon Musk; he planned to follow their entrepreneurial path and open his own start-up. His parents encouraged him to do so. But his father reminded him that for a start-up to succeed, the most critical task is to sell the idea to venture capitalists early on. To get his feet wet in the world of finance, he decided to start out with a job in an investment bank.
Fei is a classmate of Rongâs. She is from a deprived mountain village in northwestern China. Both of her parents are farmers; one of them attended high school but did not finish. Most of her peers from the village went to work in factories in Shenzhen or Guangzhou right after middle school. She is one of the very few who actually went to high school. All she did there was cram. She had to score high enough to get into a college; otherwise, she would have to follow her peers into a life of manual labor. She had never planned to go to WU because her score was not enough, but just before she took the college entrance examination, her high school was listed in WUâs Take-Off Plan, which lowered the test scores to recruit students from impoverished, rural areas. When the college offer arrived, her parents burst into tears. She was thrilled too but immediately realized that she did not even know how she would physically get to the school. There was no high-speed train near her village. The journey to Shanghai ended up taking her about 24 hours and three different trains. Arriving in the city, she had only the vaguest idea of what the college looked like. She was pretty sure a bright future awaited her because this was all parents and teachers told her. But after the first semester, Fei found that college seemed not to work the way she had expected. The teaching style at WU was a âculture shockâ to her. âWe are like trains,â she explained. âIn high school, the teachers were like the train conductors, traveling along with us. But in college, the professors are like train dispatchers⊠Itâs all up to us.â
Rong and Fei come from very different backgrounds. How different will their career prospects be after they graduate? If this question were asked in China 30 years ago, the answer would have been simple: their future prospects would be equally bright. In the 1980s, when less than a quarter of Chinese high school graduates were able to attend college, and jobs were assigned by the state, a bachelorâs degree guaranteed a good job. Graduating with the same degree from the same university, Rong and Fei would have been given similar job placements.
Yet, if the question is asked now, it is not easy to answer. More than three quarters of Chinese high school graduates now attend college, and though a bachelorâs degree still leads to a job for most graduates, it is not necessarily a good job. Though the unemployment rate for Chinese college graduates remains very low, a sizeable proportion cannot find work immediately and may end up in jobs that do not require a college education. Given the abundance of college students, employers no longer treat bachelorâs degrees like they used to; they now look more closely at the job candidatesâ skills and capabilities. In this case, Rong and Feiâs future will not likely rest on their diplomas but rather on what they actually do in college. Their career chances are more likely to be related to their family backgrounds, their geographic origins, and the experience they gain in their studies.
This book explores how differences in family background operate on college campuses and how they may lead to differences in the college-to-work transition among students. It documents the career development and emerging adulthood experience of 32 Chinese undergraduate students like Rong and Feiââstudents who are enrolled in an elite university but whose origins may be either urban or rural. This book shows that, although students rarely acknowledge it, college magnifies family background differences, giving urban students an initial âleg upâ to succeed in college. But the book does not stop here. College also provides opportunities for students to reflect on their past in making their future. This book, in short, reveals the hidden role that family background plays in shaping the way college students construct their careers. Intertwined with college experience, family background can constrain, while an initial advantage begets further advantages; family background can also enable, which triggers reflection for students to create their own ways into the labor market and the real world.
1.1 Family Background and the College-to-Work Transition
The expansion of higher education logically results in degree inflation. As colleges enroll more students, the supply of graduates increases, reducing the value of a bachelorâs degree. This is not specific to China; it occurs in many places around the world. In Dismissed by Degree, economists Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman of Harvard Business School argued that degree inflation traps college graduates in a labor market situation of underemployment (Fuller & Raman, 2017). In 2014, the Federal Research Bank of New York issued a report estimating that, on average, 30% of American college graduates are underemployed; the percentage has risen, particularly in the wake of the 2008 recession (Abel, Deitz, & Su, 2014). Burning Glass Technologies, an analytical software company that provides data and analysis of job growth and labor market trends, warns of the harsh realities faced by contemporary college students: âEmployers are seeking a bachelorâs degree for jobs that formerly required less education, even when the actual skills required havenât changed or when this makes the position harder to fillâ (Burning Glass, 2014).
The problem of degree inflation might appear to affect everyone equally, but it is made even worse by the existence of sharp differences in employment outcomes for people of different family backgrounds. College students from relatively wealthy families usually obtain the highest-paying jobs (Rivera, 2012). First-generation college graduates often suffer disproportionately from degree inflation. Analyzing the labor market outcomes of 2012 graduates from 15 public universities in Michigan, Aronson, Callahan, and Davis (2015) found that first-generation students did not fare as well as those with at least one parent with a bachelorâs degree did in terms of employment status, debt and income levels, and subjective assessments of job opportunities and financial stress. Though school-to-work transition is generally viewed as a challenge, first-generation college students see it as a âcrisisâ (Aronson, 2008).
It is logical, then, to ask how this difference in the college-to-work transition is related to studentsâ family backgrounds. Career construction does not start after students arrive on campus. Rather, students arrive with varying amounts of prior knowledge about careers and explore their options further in college. They grow up in environments that shape their ideas and expectations about their future careers. They develop career expectations and knowledge from the experiences of parents and relatives, from the future portrayed by teachers, and from reading, movies, TV programs, and so on (Xiao, Newman, & Chu, 2016).
This question about the implications of family background for the college-to-work transition reminds us of the decades of debate on whether college is an equalizer or a gatekeeper. Subscribers to the equalizer view assume that college is a shelter from the outside world where the power of the past prevails. Once students are admitted to college and arrive on campus, they enter an environment full of new opportunities to explore. They live and interact with faculty and peers, far away from parents and neighbors. This is the belief college studentsâparticularly first-generation studentsâgenerally hold. They imagine that college is salvation, an opportunity to say goodbye to the past, and hard work will enable them to achieve upward mobility (Silva & Snellman, 2018).
Some social scientists have taken the equalizer view further, believing that college can narrow the socioeconomic gap among students that results from differences in family background. This subset of scholars believes that college not only washes studentsâ pasts away but also encourages students from disadvantaged families to keep up, as long as they fully participate in college activities, attending student clubs and interacting with faculty and peers (Tinto, 1987, 1988). Brand and Xie (2010) used two national representative samples and sophisticated statistical models to demonstrate that the students who are least likely to attend college are the ones who economically benefit from it the most. In How College Affects Students, Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini (1991) present a comprehensive review of the research literature on higher education from the 1970s to the 2000s. Their conclusion can be summed up in a single short sentence: Students who engage in college activities succeed. From their argument, the higher dropout rates among first-generation and minority college students in the United States are likely related to their lower levels of participation in extracurricular activities, fewer interactions with faculty and staff, and lower college satisfaction.
Another set of scholars emphasizes an opposing set of findings that supports the view of college as a gatekeeper for perpetuating the power of the past (i.e., family background). These scholars emphasize that the college environment is not neutral but rather operates according to cultural rules, norms, and expectations that cultivate privilege (Bourdieu, 1989). According to this view, students from affluent families, raised to understand the code and conduct of the privileged, enjoy an initial advantage in college compared to other students for whom college culture is more difficult to assimilate (Massey, Charles, Lundy, & Fischer, 2003). This initial edge allows students from advantaged backgrounds to access college resources easier and earlier, as higher education distributes rewards according to prior achievements (Fischer, Mooney, Charles, & Massey, 2009; Stuber, 2012).
In her 2014 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Anette Lareau (2015, p. 1) succinctly summarized the gatekeeper view: âThe key issue was⊠the uneven rewards dominant institutions bestowed on different types of strategies.â In a recent award-winning book, Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) vividly showed that the American college fosters a âriskyâ partying culture. But this culture does not work for working-class students because they lack the necessary knowledge and resources. Yet, most working-class students still follow it because it looks cool and mainstream. As might be expected, however, it fails in the end.
Taken too far, both views sound like myths. The equalizer view regards college as a neutral place where family background can be completely transcended. According to the equalizer myth, Rong and Fei would experience no difference in their career construction process, despite the sharp differences in their parentsâ education, income, expectations about the future, and so on. The gatekeeper view, on the other hand, emphasizes that th...