“Bad Students Go to Vocational Schools!”: Education, Social Reproduction and Migrant Youth in Urban China

China’s second-generation rural-to-urban migrant youth, who grew up in their parents’ adopted cities, are still denied urban residential status and suffer from the institutional closure of higher education opportunities. This article explores in ethnographic detail the experiences and subjectivities of migrant youth in Shanghai who since 2008 have been channeled to secondary vocational schools. It highlights the direct involvement of the local state in reproducing a social hierarchy in which migrant youth provide cheap labor for manufacturing and low-skilled service industries. It reveals how contention over the limited choice of majors and career trajectories persists between state intention, market demand and individual aspirations. The time and space provided by vocational schooling enable migrant students to gain urban habitus and form networks across boundaries. Vocational schools have thus become a unique site for studying education and class reproduction in a late-socialist context.