Elite College Education and Social Mobility in China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4362835 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ruixue Jia (0000-0002-4381-4640, University of California San Diego), Hongbin Li (0000-0002-5229-0076, Stanford University), Lingsheng Meng (0000-0003-0991-1719, Stanford University) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 1145-1186 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Economic Development and Cultural Change (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0079 • E-ISSN: 1539-2988 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/730493 |
| OpenAlex | W4392930307 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
We study how an elite college education affects social mobility in China. China provides an interesting context because its college admissions rely mainly on the scores of a centralized exam, a system that has been the subject of intense debate. Combining the data from a large-scale college graduate survey and a nationally representative household survey, we document three main findings. First, attending an elite college can change one’s fate to some extent. It raises the child’s rank in the income distribution by almost 20 percentiles. Nevertheless, it does not change the intergenerational relationship in income ranks or guarantee one’s entry into an elite occupation or industry. Second, while elite college access rises with parental income, the disparity is less pronounced in China than in the United States. In China, top-quintile children are 2.3 times more likely to attend an elite college compared with bottom-quintile children, versus an 11.2-fold difference in the United States. Third, the score-based cutoff rule in elite college admission is income neutral. Overall, these findings reveal both the efficacy and the limitations of China’s elite colleges in shaping social mobility
China · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Elite · Political science · Politics · Social mobility · Social science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Global Educational Reforms and Inequalities · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes
Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College
How robust is the evidence on the effects of college quality? Evidence from matching
Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States
The Effect of Attending the Flagship State University on Earnings
Global Inequality Dynamics
Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015
Top Incomes in the Long Run of History
The State Nobility
Between a rock and a hard place
Walking a Policy Tightrope
Does having a cadre parent pay? Evidence from the first job offers of Chinese college graduates
Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children
Intergenerational Mobility and the Timing of Parental Income
Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China
Intergenerational Inequality
The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective
Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |