Rural students’ evolving educational aspirations and the sense of ‘fit’ in the changing context of China’s higher education: a life history approach

Since the restoration of the Gaokao (College Entrance Examination) in 1977 and the nationwide higher education expansion that started in 1998, millions of rural students have enrolled in urban universities. Though Chinese rural students’ educational trajectories have received extensive attention, their subjective experiences in the rapidly changing context of the higher education system remain insufficiently represented in the literature. This paper utilises a life history approach to explore three successful rural students’ journeys towards and through higher education, graduating from university in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Through interweaving the social context and individual accounts in this paper, I examine how educational aspirations (as individual choices and strategies) are shaped by changes in the social milieus in which one is situated and how rural students perceive classed differences in the context of an expanding urban–rural divide. I highlight the point that rural families’ aspirations towards higher education are not simply personal preference but rather are constructed within the nexus of perceived limitations and opportunities and are complexly shaped by the social and economic context. I argue that, though the forms of symbolic domination might vary across the studied timeframe—from clothes to extra-curricular activities to comprehensive ability—the rural students’ disadvantaged situation in the urban university remained largely unchanged.