Elite College Education and Social Mobility in China

We study how an elite college education affects social mobility in China. China provides an interesting context because its college admissions rely mainly on the scores of a centralized exam, a system that has been the subject of intense debate. Combining the data from a large-scale college graduate survey and a nationally representative household survey, we document three main findings. First, attending an elite college can change one’s fate to some extent. It raises the child’s rank in the income distribution by almost 20 percentiles. Nevertheless, it does not change the intergenerational relationship in income ranks or guarantee one’s entry into an elite occupation or industry. Second, while elite college access rises with parental income, the disparity is less pronounced in China than in the United States. In China, top-quintile children are 2.3 times more likely to attend an elite college compared with bottom-quintile children, versus an 11.2-fold difference in the United States. Third, the score-based cutoff rule in elite college admission is income neutral. Overall, these findings reveal both the efficacy and the limitations of China’s elite colleges in shaping social mobility.