The impact of family class differences on the higher education accessibility of offspring: Evidence from China

Abstract

This study constructs a logit model to examine the impact of family class differences on the higher education accessibility of offspring, and examines the moderating effect of the higher education expansion policy on the relationship between family class differences and higher education accessibility of offspring. The data was collected from 5181 valid samples who responded to 2018 Chinese General Social Survey Questionnaire. The results show that both overall higher education accessibility and high-quality higher education accessibility of the offspring of upper-class families and middle-class families are significantly higher than the offspring of bottom class families. This suggested that the offspring of upper-class families is more likely to receive high-quality higher education than other classes. It was also revealed that higher education expansion policy significantly increases the overall higher education and high-quality higher education accessibility of offspring from different class families, as a result of which overall and high-quality higher education are significantly less accessible to the offspring of the bottom-class families. This implies that the higher education expansion policy has further widened the gap between the offspring of the bottom-class families and the offspring of the upper-class families and the middle-class families. As a result, this study proposes to improve the higher education financial support policy for the offspring of bottom-class families and to develop special programs for the offspring of bottom-class families.