[MUSIC]. In week two we turn to education and social mobility in contemporary China focusing on the second half of the twentieth century. this project is in collaboration with Liang Chen former postdoc from our group who is now an associate professor of history at Nanjing University. So Week 2 is about what we call a silent revolution. Student diversity at two of China's elite universities. Peking University is a national University and SuzHou University, which is a provincial level university. The question we asked was the one which absorbs an enormous number of Chinese parents, as well as Chinese students, is given that life is unfair and that you're dealing with some people who sort of whose race to the top is propelled by limousines, and other people who have to pull carts. to what extent are the poor cart pullers at least empowered by the fact that they have a university education. You see the the sort of the, the laureate cap on the head of the poor man pulling the cart. and to what extent, of course, does that university credential help make up for the fact and that they're not riding the limousine and have to compete against the the guy who actually looks a little bit like me, you know, the sort of overweight person, wearing suspenders who likes sweet sweet food. and so that's the question which we are addressing in in this week's talk. So, fundamentally, it comes down to in this first part, which is about who gets what. We're talking about who gets what in terms of education and income. So, the first comparative question we'd like to start off with is, we'd like to ask you to ask yourself in say the United States, which is the most open and democratic developed country we know of. In elite American universities, what proportion of students cover the top 1, 5, 20% of households, and what percent of students in these elite universities, the Harvards, the Yales, the Princetons, the MITs, the Caltechs. What percent come from the bottom half of the income distribution? The answers are surprising. This comes from the 2008-09 freshman class survey done of 1,400 American universities. And it distinguishes between very high private universities, the light green, high public universities, the light blue, high private universities, the red line, and the general distribution of annual income in the United States, the black line. And what you can see is, is that the top 20% of households get 70 to 80% of all the student slots in the very high private universities. The top 5% of households get 40% of student slots. And the bottom half, which in the United States would be houses that make less than high 40s. $1000 a year, the bottom half get something like 18, 20, 25% at best. the bottom quarter probably only gets 6, 7% of student slots. So the top 5% get the top 40, get 40%, the bottom 25% gets 6, 7% of studentships in the top elite American universities. So, hardly that equal. So, what about China especially as China is becoming increasingly unequal in terms of income? moving from a Gini coefficient near that of Sweden, in the high 20s, to a Gini coefficient more unequal in the United States, somewhere in the high 40s, mid-high 40s. this graph shows the rise in the Gini coefficient of income (no period) nationally over time in the quarter or 30 years from 1978 to 2006. And you can see, we roughly show it increase from somewhere around Sweden to somewhere past the United States in inequality. So given that China is becoming increasingly unequal in income, do we see the same inequality sort of corrupting and becoming more pervasive in terms of university education in China including Hong Kong. this is especially interesting because the number of elite universities in China has hardly increased in terms of the number of student places. While university admissions for Chinese students has increased from roughly two to almost 20%, the number of elite universities hasn't really increased at all. And yet, at the same time, the number of Chinese who are eligible to go to university, the green line, that is the number of people who graduate from senior high school has increased from about 6% to over 70% during the last half of the 20th century. So given that the population at risk, the eligible population to go to university having increased by a factor of ten given that inequality has more than doubled from a Gini coefficient of mid-20s to mid to high 40s. What has happened to elite university education in China and for that matter in Hong Kong? To what extent do we find these inequalities to be perhaps even worse than the United States or the same as the United States. Again, when we look at the numbers, the the results are surprising. In Hong Kong, it turns out the same year that we saw such vast inequalities in high private, very high private American universities. It turns out that half of all university students and the universities in Hong Kong actually come from the bottom half of the income pool, half, 50%, not 6 or 7% as the United States. Though, we see, here is the results of a freshman survey run in all eight Hong Kong universities in the same freshman class, 2008 to 2009 with in order Hong Kong Baptist university. Hong Kong University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, the aquamarine line, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, my university. Polytechnic University, Lingnan University, Hong Kong University of Higher Education, City University, and then you have the bold A purple line, which is monthly, the distribution of monthly household income in Hong Kong, in 2008 and 2009. And what you see is that, first of all, the three so-called research universities in Hong Kong, Hong Kong University which is over 100 years old. Chinese University of Hong Kong which is over 60 years old. And Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. You can see that the profile of their incoming students is roughly the same as the other five Hong Kong public universities. In fact, the shape of all student distributions for all eight universities is roughly the same. Hong Kong University has slightly more students coming from households that make more than 50,000 Hong Kong dollars a month, which would be the top 5, 5-10% of households in Hong Kong. at the same time, they take in, 20, 50, 30, 50% of their students from households making 19,000 or less Hong Kong a month. That is roughly around the median or less since the median household income in 2008-2009 was 17,500. So, in contrast to the United States which is a much more open society but where university admissions is distinctly closed to people from lower income groups. In Hong Kong we find that in spite of conditions are very similar to those in China at large we find that even at the best universities. The majority of student places go to people making either the bottom half, the bottom 2 thirds, the bottom 3 quarters of the income distribution which is almost the exact inverse of what we had in the United States. Now, Hong Kong achieves such high proportions of diversity because most elite families send their children overseas for university education. So in other words, we're not looking at a closed population. In Mainland China, however, although most universities, most students go to university domestically The proportion of students who come from families with no tertiary education turns out to be equal or even greater than Hong Kong. And this is as true as the elite national universities, such as Beijing University, and provincial universities such as [UNKNOWN] University. based on what we shall see in the, in the, in the following lecture.
