“Lost at the starting line”: a reconsideration of educational inequality in China, 1978–2008

This research explores the changes in educational inequality between school transitions in China. Due to the mechanism of differentiated selection, life course, and heterogeneous early education, the impact of students’ socioeconomic status and cultural background on their educational opportunities is expected to decline in secondary and higher education, while the impact of the grade of school is assumed to rise. A multinomial logistic regression was carried out to test this hypothesis based on the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey. Results show that the early stages see the most severe inequality of educational attainment; as students move up to higher stages of education, the contribution of SES and cultural background is largely replaced by the grade of school. Therefore, more emphasis should be put on educational inequality at an early stage.