Below you will find the Week 2, Mod 2.2 lecture, with some editing - see italicized words. Unknowns are replaced with correct words and extraneous or duplicate words were removed.
Week 2, Mod 2.2 Lecture
So to answer this question in the second part of this talk, we look at student diversity at two specific universities. Peking University, as I said, one of the best national universities from 1950 to 1999, and Suzhou University, one of the best provincial level universities, from 1950 to 2003. These would be the years of the entering freshmen class, so the 2003 class graduated in 2007.
For this part of the lecture, we are looking at the results of a group project involving number of my colleagues at Hong Kong university of Science and Technology, as well as other universities, especially in this case, who used to be a Post Doctoral fellow and is now an assistant professor, soon to be an associate professor of History at Nanjing University.
And we have also, our colleagues for the Peking University, University Archives and the SZU University. University Archives, who are kind enough to make the student registration cards of the entering freshman classes available to us for data entry and data analysis.
Now the Peking University student registration cards - we have about 65,000 of them entered into computer comprising our first big data sort of study for this lecture this week, and as you'll see, the data actually only come from three or four periods, 1952 to 1955, 1972 to 1987, and 1989 to 1999. We're missing data for a number of years. 1949 to 1951, 1956 to 1965, and 1970 to 1971, and then usually, and this is worth noting given China's recent national history, we're missing also the student cards for the freshman class of 1988. Their data was removed from campus in University.
So what we'll be reporting on today is a summary of 65,000 undergraduate student registration cards for the years which we do have data on from Peking University and from 86,000 student registration cards from Suzhou University. For Suzhou University, the data are more complete.
As for Suzhou University, in terms of where it stands, in terms of the distribution of high school graduates, about ten per 100 high school graduates in Jiangsu Province qualify for entry to Suzhou University. In contrast, for Peking University, nationally it's about one per 1,000 high school graduates that are nationally qualified for entry into Peking University, and about one per hundred in Peking City.
Now the data which we're going to be accessing consists of a common kind of student registration card mandated by the Chinese Ministry of Education, and it includes only some 20 variables: Student ID, Name, Department, and Major. For today's class, we'll be looking at only a few of these. We'll be looking at Sex. We'll be looking at Year. We'll be looking at Major Social Relations and Occupations of parents. We'll be looking at detailed postal address and we'll be looking at prior schooling, only five of the 20 variables, because these five at least give us information on the gender of students, the provincial and geographic origin, their parental occupation, and their prior schooling.
So 4 of the 8 sources of student diversity - the other 4 we ignore in today's talk. Ethnicity, family income, parental education and urban rule. because of lack of time, or in the case of income and education, because lack of information on the student registration card.
Now the first thing to note is that the Peking University and Suzhou University data are not evenly spread throughout China in terms of their origins. Peking University actually has a mandated quota by province, or by provincial level city, whereas you'll see for the most favored city, which is Peking of course, 147 students for every 10,000 high school graduates go to Peking University. That's at the high end, whereas, in say Xinjiang province or Guangdong Province, surprisingly enough, only three out of every 10,000 high school graduates get to go to Peking University.
So, provincial level quotas are inherently very unequal, favor the more well off cities, and favor the well off provincial seaboard populations of Xieling, Liaoning province, Chuciang province, Fujien province, and Hainan. Similarly, while there is no set of quotas for Suzhou University, Suzhou University draws over 95% of its students entirely from Jiangsu province. Even though they don't have an internal quota system, you can see that overwhelmingly, most of the students are local, from Suzhou itself, which is the very dark shaded area on the map. If not from Suzhou itself, then from Southern Jiangsu Province, as opposed to Northern Jiangsu Province, which is the much lighter color on the map.
Now, we first of all we look at this data, and we look at the first variable in this pseudo registration card gender. We see that actually there has been a remarkable change, in terms of the diversity of students, with many more female students, especially in the 80's and the 90's. Such that in Suzhou University, which is the green line, about one male student for every female students, whereas before, in 1949, there were two male students for every female students in a kind of fluctuating or up and down up until 1979, and then a steady sort of equalization of the male female sex ratio.
What you see is then Peking University, which are the red dots. You had a distribution that was originally even more unequal - over four male students for every female student - declining more or less monotonically starting in 1979, such that now it's about 1.3 to 1.4 males for every female student. And what you can also see, from the blue line, is that these declining proportions of inequality, by gender, more or less are mapped nationally, they equate nationally, with the gender ratio of universe as a whole, for China as a whole.
In other words, one of the most stubborn dimensions of inequality, that persisted for millennia, between the sexes in China, especially in the last two decades of the 20th century, suddenly became more and more equal. And so that's one example, one very straightforward consistent example, of diversity. With occupation, it's much more complex.
Now in this graph, what we're looking at is the parental occupation of PKU university parents. In this case it's both parents - the mother and the father, if they're employed. In other words, the numbers actually map out to perhaps over 100%, because if you have two parents, then for every student, it could be 200%. And what we've done is we've taken some 8,000 occupations, that are reported by the students filling out the card, and we've grouped them into one, two, three, four, five, six large categories.
The first one, the blue dot, is administrator and the party leadership or commercial enterprise leadership children. The second one, the maroon sort of a diamond, is the children of professionals, engineers, doctors, professors. The next, a very kind of consistent blue green line, is the children of office workers, and then equally consistent is the children of a sort of retail shopkeepers.
Then we have two lines, administrative children or professional children, which are very up and down; we have the blue squares, which are the children of farmers, or fisherman, or shepherds, and the orange circles, which are the children of factory workers.
Now what we see here is that the children of farmers, which during the cultural revolution, was as high, at one point, as 50% of the students, had at least one parent who was a farmer, has declined to something like 15% now. At the same time, we see that the children of factory workers, which was about 13% to 14% in the mid 1980s, has increased significantly to well over 20%.
In the late 1990s, an increase of about 70% to 80%, but that this increase is dwarfed by the increase in the children of administrators, whether they are state enterprises, party organization or commercial enterprises. And then you have the children of course professionals who do the best. Possibly these are professors kids who learn how to test at their mothers breast and therefore do especially well.
Now we have lot of variation in contrast to the very monotonic, consistent of the sort of increasingly diverse student body by gender. Here we have a picture, which is much more mixed, on the one hand increasing inequality, with the rise of elite children and the decline of farming children, and at the same time, though, a significant increase in factory kids. Mirroring perhaps, also, the rise in factory workers in general, in China, of course, with China's phenomenal economic growth starting in the late seventies, early eighties.
In Suzhou University, we see something which is roughly similar. We see that the children of administrators, which was originally well below 10% in the 1950s, has become around 30% by the late 20th century, early 21st century. The children of professionals is also high, 30% though it has declined steadily since the 1989. and we can, see that in Suzhou University, unlike Peking University, the children of farmers has stayed roughly consistent at about 25% for the last quarter century. And the children of factory workers has actually doubled from 10% in 1989 to 20%, in 2003.
So in orders, if you take farmers' children and factory workers' children and add them together, you get about 50%. So half the children in China come from sort of elite families, half the children in China come from working class families, and those elite families tend to be the student Cadre families, tend to be not party official children, but the children of commercial enterprises.
So here what we've done is we've taken the children of the Chinese, called Cadres Campbell, and the proportion here is shown by the vertical histogram. And we've then divided them into one, two, three, four main categories. One is the blue line, which is Political Cadres and State Administrators. Then you have the red line, which is Entrepreneurial Cadres and the state administrators. The green line which is other Cadres, and then the purple line which is unidentifiable Cadres where we're not sure how to how to assign them, whether they were a commercial or state enterprise or other.
And what you can see here is that starting from the early 1970s, there's a gradual decline in the proportion of Cadre children who come from party and political Cadre families. And that's dwarfed, however, by a very steady increase, from almost zero to forty percent of all Cadres coming from commercial enterprises. So, in other words, this phenomenal increase in the number of Cadre children, at least in Suzhou University, is not from a exercise of political power by party secretaries or by university presidents, but rather is a display of the ability of the new Chinese entrepreneurs, the new commercial class (Entrepreneurial Cadres) that's leading China's economic growth, and their ability to place their children into at least an elite provincial university such as Suzhou University.
We don't unfortunately know the results for Peking University, because we were not able to do that analysis for Peking University. So what that means is that if we were to take the students and look at the distribution of parents by employment, and we were to compare that to the distribution of employment in Jiangsu Province overall, we would see that children of Cadres placed something like 10 times - they bat 10 times out of their weight class. So for ever single Cadre, there is about 10 Cadre kids that are going to Suzhou University.
At the same time, for factory workers, it's almost roughly equal. For very worker, there is 0.8 - almost one student for every factory worker. The only occupation that is highly disadvantaged is the farmer, where the ratio is two to one - it takes two farmers to send one student to Suzhou University.
In Peking University, the proportions are roughly the same, except they're more extreme. Peking University takes five farmers to send one student to Peking University. So, in other words, it's much harder for farming families to send kids to a one per 1,000 university, as opposed to a ten per 100 university.
Cadres is almost 20 times their weight class in the population overall. Factory workers surprisingly it's more than one. So for every factory worker you'll find somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 students going to Peking University.
Now, if we were to interact this with geography, what we see is that the distribution actually is quite revealing, because we can see is that if we look at the students from Cadre families by province, and we compare that to the distribution of Cadres by province, we see that far more Cadre families are likely to have their children test into Peking University.
In the less-developed frontier provinces of Hainan, Guangsi, Guizhou, Yunnan, and surprisingly Sechuan, and where you have the very dark-shaded areas as compared to the lightest-shaded areas which are Beijing. So in Beijing, being a Cadre, you only get to bat seven times your weight, whereas if you're a Cadre in Yunan or Hinan, you would be batting at 25, 30 or 40 times your weight, as opposed to seven times your weight.
While the contrast with farmers is almost exactly the opposite. For farmers who get their kids into Peking University remember, nationally it takes almost five farmers to get one kid into Peking University. But along the very rich provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, you see that it's almost 0.7 - that's all instead of being .2, it's almost 1. Whereas in very remote areas, such as Yunnan and Guizhou, it can be as low as point 0.07, as opposed to 0.2.
So in other words farm families in the rich sea board provinces are 10 times more likely to be able to get their children into Peking University, then farm families from remote provinces. Probably reflecting both the different cultural capital and the education of the families, and more important, as we will see in the moment, their access to good schools, because there are far more good rural primary schools, junior high schools, even senior high schools in Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, than there are in Yunnan and Guizhou.
