CGHE Webinar 309

Positional competition among Chinese University Graduates

Date: Tuesday, 19 July 2022 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: Zoom webinar
Speaker(s):
  • Po YANG, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, China
  • Zhitang LIANG, Yenching Academy, Peking University, China
  • Benjamin Mulvey, Faculty of Education and Human Development at the Education University of Hong Kong
  • Ewan Wright, Faculty of Education and Human Development at the Education University of Hong Kong

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

Global higher education expansion has produced many unintended consequences. In the context of limited supply of elite job positions in labor market, tertiary expansion can lead to cohort crowing and exacerbate inequality in graduate employment.

This panel introduces two papers on Chinese college graduates’ experiences. The first paper, titled “Effort or pedigree? A Study on Unequal Employment among Chinese Elite University Graduates”, focuses on the elite reproduction in elite universities, using multiple explanatory cases with thick description based on interview data. Its analytical framework is generated from theories of boundaries and positional conflict theory. It identifies three strategies for elite college students’ career advancement, namely “positioning, ranking, and leaping forward”, through which individuals from privileged backgrounds benefit most from resources and opportunity stacking in elite education circle. Internship becomes the bridge between elite education circle and elite employment circle.

The second paper, titled “Global and local possible selves: Differentiated strategies for positional competition among Chinese university students”, develops a neo-Weberian reading of involution to construct a framework using positional conflict theory and the concept of ‘possible selves’. It investigates how final-year university students from three social class factions—rural, urban non-elite and urban elite—envisage, plan and strategies for their future careers. This study demonstrates how social class is deeply connected to the scale of the competition—national or global—that students perceive themselves to be implicated in.

Presenters will be Po YANG, Zhitang LIANG and Benjamin Mulvey, while Ewan Wright will be a discussant.

CGHE webinars are fully open to participants. They are interactive, enabling attendees to speak directly in the webinar, ask questions of speakers when called in by the chair and see all other participants. At any time you can communicate directly with others, either all together or on a one-to-one basis, through the webinar Chat.

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

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