A wave of educational expansion intended to break the ossification of society has, more than two decades later, revealed complex consequences. The widespread possession of university degrees has not eliminated the influence of family background; instead, it has enabled advantaged resources to continue their intergenerational transmission in more sophisticated and resilient ways. An empirical study based on long-term survey data uncovers the complex truth behind this grand social experiment in China.
For hundreds of millions of Chinese families—especially those who have tilled the land or labored in factories for generations—the massive expansion of higher education in 1999 was undoubtedly a beam of light cast into reality. It embodied a clear social contract: work hard at school, and a university diploma would serve as a passport, carrying you away from your parents’ hardships into the gleaming world of the modern economy. Over the ensuing two decades, university enrollment rates surged like a rising tide, leaping from under 10 percent in the elite phase to today’s stage of mass higher education. This unprecedented accumulation of human capital has shaped the destinies of an entire generation.
The widely held public belief has been that the massification of education necessarily entails greater social mobility. When university education ceases to be the privilege of a few, the influence of family background on individual achievement should naturally weaken, and an era of “competing through family connections” should give way to one of “competing through ability.”
However, a recent study published in the leading international journal International Journal of Educational Development adds a cautious and unsettling footnote to this optimistic social narrative. Drawing on eight years of data from the China Family Panel Studies, two researchers conducted an in-depth analysis of how higher education expansion has affected relative intergenerational income mobility. Relative intergenerational income mobility—a core indicator of social equity—does not ask whether children earn more than their parents (a change often driven by overall economic growth), but whether children’s positions and rankings on the income ladder can be independent of their parents’ rankings. The findings are sobering: nationwide, higher education expansion has not significantly weakened the association between parents’ income status and their children’s eventual income outcomes.
This does not mean that education has lost its value. A university degree remains a necessary threshold for entry into the contemporary urban labor market. Yet the study clearly shows that when it comes to determining one’s relative rank and final position on the income ladder, the shadow of family capital has not faded; rather, it continues to operate in a more resilient and refined manner.
How, then, have advantaged families managed to secure the intergenerational transmission of their status amid the torrent of higher education expansion? The study reveals a mechanism of “upgrading” and “shifting” advantaged capital. Before expansion, scarce university slots constituted the first—and most formidable—barrier, and family competition centered on ensuring that children could simply “get over the threshold.” Once expansion flattened this barrier, however, urban middle- and high-income families displayed remarkable strategic adaptability. They swiftly redirected competition toward stratification within higher education itself. No longer satisfied with merely having their children “attend university,” they focused instead on “attending the best universities.”
The study’s quantitative models strongly support this interpretation, particularly in cities and regions where higher education resources are highly concentrated, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In these resource-rich areas, the intergenerational income correlation has not declined; instead, it has shown signs of strengthening, suggesting a risk of mobility becoming increasingly rigid. Sociologists interpret this as evidence that the massification of higher education has shifted resource competition among advantaged families from the “quantity of credentials” to the “quality of credentials.” By mobilizing their economic, cultural, and social capital, these families begin early to pave pathways for their children toward elite domestic universities and prestigious overseas institutions.
Degrees from these elite universities are not merely educational credentials in the labor market; they function as scarce status signals and gateways to high-value alumni networks. Against a backdrop of labor market oversupply, employers naturally gravitate toward graduates of top-tier institutions, effectively consolidating the advantaged classes’ monopoly over elite employment opportunities. Ironically, educational expansion has further intensified the scarcity and exclusivity of high-quality educational resources. This marks a shift in class barriers—from the explicit threshold of “whether one receives higher education” to the implicit threshold of “how high-quality one’s higher education is.”
In stark contrast stands the “low-quality trap” confronting rural and underdeveloped regions where educational resources are scarce. Expansion has indeed sent more rural students to university—an achievement of historic significance. Yet these students often enroll in ordinary undergraduate institutions or vocational colleges with insufficient investment and relatively low social prestige. When they enter an increasingly competitive labor market with their diplomas, the “market value” of these credentials is often insufficient to offset their families’ profound disadvantages in social capital. They lack crucial career guidance, high-end internship opportunities, and—most importantly—family networks capable of ushering them into high-return industries.
The study finds that income gains for these students are modest, with economic returns insufficient to help them cross their parents’ low-income class boundary. From the perspective of social equity, this not only implies a low return on educational investment but more harshly suggests that the chain of intergenerational poverty persists stubbornly beneath the surface of educational expansion. For these families, the opportunity costs of educational investment are high, yet the promised class mobility fails to materialize, making education resemble an expensive “placebo” rather than a genuine “springboard for mobility.”
The study also notes, however, that a key to breaking this impasse lies in upgrading educational levels. Under the pressure of “credential devaluation” brought about by the massification of undergraduate education, graduate education (master’s and doctoral degrees) has become a new ladder of social mobility. This higher-level, more specialized education introduces new forms of scarcity and new sites for human capital accumulation, significantly improving individuals’ income rankings. Even a girl from rural Henan, through sustained effort, may earn a doctoral degree from an elite university and secure a faculty position at a leading institution in a first-tier city. Of course, even on this new high ground, advantaged families retain an edge: they are better positioned to provide the financial and resource support necessary for prolonged education.
Even more thought-provoking are recent research trends—such as analyses of returnee (overseas-educated) employment—which further confirm that at the most fiercely competitive stages of the labor market, family social capital (parents’ occupational networks and institutional ties) can exert a marginal effect on access to high-paying, state-sector positions that exceeds the returns generated by elite overseas education itself. This indicates that family resources shape not only the starting point of education, but also the endpoint and efficiency with which educational returns are realized, rendering the entire chain of intergenerational transmission more complex and resilient.
Ultimately, the findings direct attention to a macro-level structural issue: the well-known “Great Gatsby Curve” in economics. The study provides compelling evidence that rising income inequality in China is significantly eroding intergenerational income mobility. This serves as a warning that educational reform cannot succeed independently of the broader economic structure. Inequality in wealth distribution corrodes equality of educational opportunity and ultimately weakens education’s capacity as a vehicle for mobility. The education system functions like a powerful amplifier: it magnifies the returns to ability and effort, but it also amplifies inequalities in initial endowments.
This poses a central challenge for policymakers. Future policies aimed at educational equity must decisively shift from a sole focus on expanding the “quantity” of education to ensuring the equitable distribution of “quality.” This requires more strategic public investment: not only improving the teaching quality of ordinary universities in rural and underdeveloped regions, fundamentally narrowing inter-institutional quality gaps and enhancing the market value of non-elite credentials, but also providing stronger career networks and employment-related social capital for graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds, helping them compensate for deficits rooted in family background.
Reference: Nan Zhang, Hongmin Fan, “The intergenerational mobility effects of higher education expansion in China,” International Journal of Educational Development, Volume 111, 2024, 103169.