Analyzing Educational Inequality in Mainland China
Summary
This article aims to investigate the educational inequality in China (Mainland) from 2017 to 2021. The data of this article is published by China's Ministry of Education. We created a unique method to calculate the special Gini Coefficients for those 31 provinces in China(Mainland). Special Gini Coefficients of the Number of Higher Education Institutions, the Number of Educational Personnel in HEIs, and the Number of Compulsory Education (middle and elementary schools) Institutions are moderately increasing. At the same time, only the Condition of Fixed Assets in HEIs shows a slightly decreasing trend. Hence, we conclude that educational inequality in China(mainland) is worsening, especially after the pandemic, and provide two improvement suggestions.
Research Article
With economic development, people's pursuit and perception of equality have become clearer. For many countries in the world, equality is an excellent objective that they want to achieve. Sociologists have constantly discovered and pointed out that the ideal equality of humans may only exist in the utopia of our imagination because inequality still exists in many aspects of our society. Getting rid of inequality has been one of the most essential concerns of the community because it has brought many obstacles to the stability of human society.
In China, equality is one of the core socialist values, yet pursuing equality in the world's most populous country is very challenging. Among policies implemented, many spoke to education equality yet not sufficient, such as the nine-year compulsory education. However, the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2019 was a huge blow to China's economy and society. According to data published by China's Ministry of Education, the social instability caused by the pandemic has also affected the increase in educational inequality between provinces in mainland China.
Literature has provided important guidelines for metrics to assess education inequality. In The Right to Education: A Foundation for Equal Opportunities, the author emphasizes education equality by examining statistics, such as school enrollment rates and constitutional guarantees of civil rights[1]. The article also compares the educational incentives of the constitutions of different countries worldwide [1]. We carried out our own analysis taking metrics including the Number of Higher Education Institutions, the Number of Educational Personnel in HEIs, the Condition of Fixed Assets in HEIs, and the Number of Compulsory Education (middle school and elementary school) Institutions owned by each province (mainland China) as their wealth and constructed Special Gini Coefficient calculations, which is is based on the cumulative share of the population compared to the cumulative share of the income they receive.
(Data Source: Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China)
Most metrics we monitored, such as special Gini Coefficients of the Number of Higher Education Institutions, the Number of Educational Personnel in HEIs, and the Number of Compulsory Education (middle school and elementary schools) Institutions are on a moderately increasing trend which means the inequality between provinces is getting worse during these five years. Notably, the Special Gini Coefficient of the Condition of Fixed Assets in HEIs shows a slightly decreasing trend, which shows an improvement in inequality between 2017 and 2021. One possible explanation for this opposite trend can be credited to the Chinese Sustainable Development Agenda, which suggests increasing investments in health and education.
Based on the results observed, we conclude education inequality remains problematic and we need to understand increasing inequality due to pandemic strike. To mitigate the inequity, we recommend:
In response to the inequality of educational personnel, the central government could support those local governments that need more educational personnel to attract more people to return or settle in places in need to build and improve the quality of local education by formulating a welfare policy.
In the short term, the government can alleviate the inequality of educational resources by providing some fixed assets. In the long run, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China can set up more campuses of higher education institutions in less-resourced areas to better overcome the obstacles brought by inequality in education in the future.
We also recommend that future research on educational inequality in China can be made more rigorous by using the special Gini algorithm we created, which takes into account, for example, the quality of schools and the conditions of the provinces to produce more accurate results and conclusions. As the results above about educational inequality show, there is a trend showing that most of the published policies about solving this issue are not very resultful or maybe need more time to present their effectiveness, and substantial future efforts need to be in place.
