An article by Emma Zang, Yining Milly Yang, and James Lee on how the family background affects students’ fields of study across different historical periods in China has been published in Sociology. Emma Zang was one of our group alumni who earned her MPhil in Social Science from HKUST in 2014 and is now an assistant professor at Yale University. Congratulations to Emma Zang and James Lee!
Here is the abstract of the article:
How family background affects students’ fields of study across different historical periods in China is not well studied. Post 1949, China explicitly prioritized specific industrial sectors when allocating resources, creating an especially strong reason to expect that the industrial sector in which a parent was employed might strongly influence a child’s educational outcomes and career aspirations. Using data from the school registration records of 51,801 students who entered an elite regional university from 1952 through 2002, this study is the first to examine the role of parents’ industrial sectors in predicting children’s fields of study and the temporal patterns of this association. Applying multinomial logistic regression and the log-multiplicative layer effect model, we found that parents’ industrial sectors predicted children’s fields of study independent of parents’ broad categories of occupation. The strength of the association was particularly strong during the Cultural Revolution and post-market transition periods.
Here is the link to the full text:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385241242044.
Zang, E., Yang, Y. M., & Lee, J. Z. (2024). Parents’ Industrial Sectors and Fields of Study: Five Decades of Evidence from an Elite Regional University in China. Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385241242044