Family Resources, Gender, and Immigration: Changing Sources of Hong Kong Educational Inequality,...

Family Resources, Gender, andImmigration: Changing Sources of HongKong Educational Inequality, 1971–2001n

David Post, University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University

Objective. This study gauged the impact of government-led educational expansionon Hong Kong’s social stratification over a 30-year period. The historically closestate control over school supply in Hong Kong allows us to test the effectivenessof public policy in changing the transmission of advantages across genera-tions. Methods. I analyzed household-level census data from 1971, 1981, 1991,and 2001. Interviews and documents were also used to illuminate reasons for trendsduring this period. Results. There was a diminishing role of family resources andgender on access to all levels of schooling until 1991. From 1991 through 2001,however, there was a reversal of this trend at the postsecondary level, as access touniversity education became more dependent on family resources. In addition, newimmigrants from mainland China were at an increased disadvantage. Conclusions.Hong Kong’s current plan to create a second tier of self-supporting postsecondaryinstitutions will exacerbate the tendency toward unequal university access, and isalso likely to segregate new arrivals from mainland China.

On July 1, 1997, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong became aSpecial Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. Aswith other geopolitical realignments, investigation of the Handover—andthe education policy associated with this transition—permits us to distin-guish between those features of the social landscape that are stable acrosstime and those that can be changed as a result of policy. This article showsthe impact on Hong Kong’s stratification system of a government-led ex-pansion of education. Micro-use data from four successive Hong Kong cen-suses provide valuable insight to both the discontinuity and the persistenceof educational inequality over 30 years as the Colony reverted to Chinesesovereignty. More generally, the experience of Hong Kong can illuminatethe changing and constant sources of differentiation that may accompanytight public control of education in other countries. This article probes the

nDirect correspondence to David Post, 404 Rackely, Penn State University, UniversityPark, PA 16803 [email protected]. The data and coding used in this article can be sharedwith other researchers wishing to investigate Hong Kong educational stratification. Thisresearch was conducted while the author was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Hong KongUniversity of Science and Technology. The author appreciates the support of colleagues in itsDivision of Social Sciences, as well as suggestions from anonymous SSQ reviewers. He alsowishes to thank Rachel Louie and Janelle Ng for computer programming assistance.

SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 85, Number 5, December 2004r2004 by the Southwestern Social Science Association

consequences for children’s futures of their gender, their immigration statusfrom mainland China, and their family resources. Using successive censusdata sets, these consequences can be seen over periods when Hong Kongincreased its investment in education. The census analyses also offer cluesabout future trends, as Hong Kong now proposes to relax its monopoly andoffload public financial responsibility for much of higher education.

Theoretical Framework for Educational Stratification, Expansion, andPublic Policy Research

Hout, Raftery, and Bell (1993) and Raftery and Hout (1993) offer anexplanation for the persistence of ‘‘maximally maintained inequality’’ inIreland, Britain, and America. Shavit and Blossfeld (1993; Shavit andMuller, 1997) apply this framework to nations with a wide variety of schoolsystems. This perspective suggests that increased enrollments for all childrenwill not necessarily change the association between social origins and theodds of continuation from one level to the next. When education oppor-tunities expand faster than the demand for them, the impact of social originswill not diminish the odds of progression through the school system unlessthe demand by more advantaged upper-class families is saturated—‘‘max-imized’’—for a particular educational progression. Only in this case wouldthe ratio of odds between privileged and disadvantaged groups be expectedto decrease. Moreover, this decrease in relative advantage could be expectedto reemerge at the subsequent level of the education system. In this con-jecture there are echoes of Sorokin’s ([1927] 1954) dark prediction oftrendless change in the intensity and generality of social mobility. Inequalitypersists because high-status parents find ways to maximize educational op-portunities. When public resources are in short supply, elite groups willpress school systems to expand so as to accommodate their children. Theseadvances can come only in relation to less advantaged children, who lagbehind in taking advantage of increased supply or quality.

The force that drives the persistence of ‘‘maximally maintained inequal-ity’’ is evident in countries with weak state authority over education, orwhere the state-society relation has been consciously chosen as one of ‘‘statesupervisory’’ as opposed to ‘‘state control’’ (Neave and van Vught, 1994). Inthese polities, elites may control funding decisions directly or indirectlythrough foundations, church groups, or elected officials. Elites may alsofound and control schools and universities. But what are the outcomes foreducational inequality under governments that have tightly controlled thesupply of schooling? This question has attracted sociologists since Sorokin’soriginal efforts, but the emerging evidence is not encouraging, even incountries (unlike Hong Kong) where governments were ideologically com-mitted to eliminating class inequality in school attainment. Countries asdisparate as Bolivia (Kelley and Klein, 1981), Hungary (Szelenyi, 1998), and

Hong Kong Educational Inequality 1239

others in much of Eastern Europe (Wong, 1998, 2001), have been inves-tigated. Evidence suggests that state-directed, tightly controlled educationalexpansion has reduced inequality no more than did market-oriented systems(where greater opportunities grew in response to elite demands). Some so-cialist regimes actually achieved less. China’s Cultural Revolution, one of theworld’s most ambitious and costly social experiments, produced no accel-eration of a previous gradual secular change toward reduced family back-ground effects as a consequence of expanding opportunity for all and givingpreference to rural peasantry (Deng and Treiman, 1997).

Based on these and other studies that have supported the perspective ofmaximally maintained inequality, what working hypotheses may be posed toexamine the evolution of educational stratification in Hong Kong? There,the expansion of education was tightly controlled, especially at the post-secondary level, where the government until recently claimed a monopolyon the provision of all degree programs. Participation in publicly controlledsecondary schooling was also never ‘‘maximized,’’ and, as recently as 2001,nearly 15 percent of children dropped out before completing secondaryschool. In the sense described by Hout, Raftery, and Bell (1993), the systemnever was saturated to such a degree that would eliminate selectivity by classor gender. Following from this observation, one working hypothesis for thehistorical investigation of opportunity is that inequalities of access persistedover the time period of this study in terms of secondary and postsecondaryeducation. Even if inequality diminished at the upper-secondary level, wewould hypothesize its reemergence as students continued to the postsec-ondary level.

Reemergent inequality is not the only possible hypothesis, however.Wealthy parents, who in other countries might have founded or controlledhigher education institutions, offered their children a different option inHong Kong: education abroad. Because of anxiety over the Handover tomainland China, many affluent families elected to send their children over-seas for an education. Especially in the case of postsecondary education, this‘‘escape valve’’ relieved pressure that would have been exerted on HongKong’s local institutions by these families. Out-migration of affluent stu-dents freed spaces for other, less affluent children, who were not so wellpositioned to compete for entry. From this perspective, an alternative hy-pothesis would be that inequality diminished in the years leading up to 1997because elites exited rather than mobilized. Given the absence of lobbying byelites for private institutions, and the attenuated competition for publicplaces, a diminished inequality could have resulted from the increasingprovision of free or heavily subsidized places for all.

Aside from the out-migration by affluent families, there is another com-plicating factor that impinges on educational opportunity and that is as-sociated with the Handover. Hong Kong relaxed its immigration restrictionsat the beginning of the 1980s and then again in 1997. As its labor marketbecame progressively integrated into a regional economy, the SAR received

1240 Social Science Quarterly

increased numbers of immigrants from the Pearl River Delta and beyond.Some economists argue that increasing immigration of lower-wage workersfrom the mainland has revived the competitiveness of Hong Kong industries(Lam and Liu, 1998). However, immigration also has its costs. Socialworkers in the SAR have emphasized the difficulties that mainland familiesface in their integration, while the Census and Statistics Department re-cently reported widespread failings by immigrants to attain the welfarestandards of longer-term Hong Kong residents (Family Welfare Society,2000; Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2002). Immigrantfamilies arrive with children whose initial education is in the school systemof China, and who are less well prepared to compete for the best schooltracks (there are currently three distinct tracks) or to enter postsecondaryeducation, which is still competitive. Despite their common ethnic (thoughnot linguistic) identity, recent immigrants may form an enclave economyand experience a ‘‘segmented assimilation,’’ as has been the case for manyimmigrants in the United States (Portes and Manning, 1994). A workinghypothesis would be that immigration from China has tended over time tosupply a lower echelon of unskilled manual labor, eliminating some op-portunities for locally born children but also eliminating competition forhigher education. From this perspective, the nature of inequality couldchange even when the degree of inequality persists. Immigration status couldemerge as a new factor in social differentiation, supplanting both gender andfamily resources, as nativity becomes an overriding resource in determiningeducational and occupations success.

What tendencies should be expected and what hypothesis should be for-mulated regarding the role of gender in educational stratification? Becausegirls’ access to education plays a mediating role in the larger process ofgender inequality (Tinker, 1976; Mason, 1985), gender theorists have paidspecial attention to the question of whether increasing the access to school-ing for all children will benefit women’s status in the longer term. From onepessimistic perspective, gender inequality is felt to be so basic to the for-mation of the state apparatus governing most education opportunities thatfew thorough-going reforms ever will be implemented fully, regardless ofhow thoughtfully they are formulated (Stromquist, 1989, 1995). In addi-tion, the domestic economy and the division of labor it replicates are distantfrom the domain of even the most activist policy intervention strategies.Women’s traditional work and domestic roles create pressures on girls toleave school earlier than boys in order to assume unpaid household respon-sibilities for their parents and siblings and—eventually—for their husbandsand their own children. With this future in mind, parents may perceivefewer benefits to schooling for daughters than for sons. Moreover, evenwhen the benefits of schooling to the individual recipient are large, parentsmay view the returns to their own family as small because girls ultimatelyassist others in patrilocal societies. Girls remain at disadvantage (Massiah,1990; Heward, 1998). Girls were found to be particularly disadvantaged in


Chinese societies in the past because of their traditional roles in the familyeconomy, as Greenhalgh (1985) discovered in Taiwan. Viewed from thisperspective, there is little reason to hypothesize a rapid change in genderinequality in Chinese societies. However, the evidence from past research ismixed. Taiwan’s recent experience suggests that changes are indeed possiblein social roles for girls as economic development proceeds. Variations ingender inequality can be seen in Broaded’s (1998) comparative case study ofstudents in Taiwan and in the PRC. Broaded found that Taiwanese girlsdeveloped aspirations at levels nearly equal to those of boys. By contrast, inthe City of Wuhan the aspirations of girls were ‘‘cooled out’’ and theselowered aspirations led to reduced proportions continuing to academic asopposed to vocational upper-secondary education. Economic growth in it-self offers no explanation for this divergence between Taiwan and themainland, as illustrated in the PRC by Hannum and Xie (1994). Duringperiods when development policies favored economic growth as opposed toequity, they found a slowing or even a reversal in gender parity in terms ofcontinuing to lower-secondary schools. Shu and Bian (2002) found genderinequality to be most pronounced in China’s most affluent and marketizedcities, where women’s odds of having college education were only 27 percentthat of men (p5 0.291). Based on the experience of cities in China as wellas arguments by gender theorists, there is no reason to hypothesize decreasedgender inequality. To the extent that Hong Kong more closely follows theTaiwanese experience, however, such a decrease could be hypothesized.

Census Sources and Data Construction

The Census and Statistics Department mounts Hong Kong’s census every10 years, with the last census conducted in March 2001. The census enu-merates persons in six-sevenths of all households, collecting basic age and sexinformation about each member. For the remaining one-seventh of house-holds, the census records more detailed information. Prior to 2001, residentswho were temporarily away from Hong Kong were enumerated, but detailedinformation was not collected. In 2001, the Census and Statistics Depart-ment adopted a wider-ranging approach in order to capture informationabout persons who were considered to be normal or legal residents of HongKong. In the one-seventh of households selected for detailed inquiry, thecensus collected information about household members who were notpresent in Hong Kong, as well as those members who currently resided inthe household. The only requirement was that absent members (termed‘‘mobile residents’’) have been in Hong Kong for one month out of the sixmonths before or after the census. In each year since 1981, the Census andStatistics Department has prepared a random 5 percent sample of house-holds, such that each household has an equal probability of being includedin the sample. In 1971, the Department created a 1 percent sample. These


census files include household-level and individual-level records. Householdrecords identify the number of occupants, number of rooms, and themonthly rent. Individual records report who is the household head, andthe relationship of each individual to the person who has been designated asthe ‘‘head.’’ Further information on educational attainments and personalincome is also collected for each household member (though personal in-come is not available for 1971).

I used two different procedures to capture family information for indi-viduals who were recorded in the census. First, in 1971, 1981, and 1991,each individual’s record provides information about the relationship of thatindividual to the person in the household who is identified as the ‘‘house-hold head.’’ In the cases of most young people, the relationship to the headis listed as that of the ‘‘son or daughter.’’ Where several young people are alljointly related to the household head as the ‘‘son or daughter,’’ then for thepurposes of this analysis these young people can be described as ‘‘siblings’’(although they may be only half-brothers or half-sisters if they share only asingle parent). The person who is related to the household head as a‘‘spouse’’ can be identified as the mother (if female) or the father (if male).A disadvantage to this procedure is that it misses information about theparents of children who live with these parents in households that are headedby a different relative. A second, improved procedure is possible in the 2001Census, when each person in the household had a distinctive serial number.For each individual, the census identifies not only the relationship with thehousehold head but the identity of that individual’s parent. For most youngpeople, the parent is also the household head, but this is not always the case.For example, among individuals ages 19–20 who were living with a parentin 2001, about 3 percent were living in households headed by a grandparent.Information on the parents of these children would have been missing basedon the methods available prior to 2001.

Note that this approach overlooks both those university students whoresided in student dormitories at the census moment, and nonstudent chil-dren who had married early and established their own households. The firstgroup is more educated than the larger population. The second group tendsto have less education. The net result is that the profile of individuals withparental information is not dramatically different from the larger popula-tion. In addition, university students overwhelmingly lived with their fam-ilies rather than in residence halls due to the shortage of dormitory space.For example, in 2001, only 3 percent of persons ages 19–20 lived in uni-versity residence halls. This number represented only 15 percent of thosewho studied at a university during the census. Finally, it is important to notethat, due to a shortage of dormitory space, universities limited the stays ofstudents to give others an opportunity to live on-campus. Thus, childrenwho lived in dormitories were a rotating population, rather than a distinctivegroup. Notwithstanding these caveats, a cautious interpretation of the censuswould not generalize beyond the population of children living with their


parents. This comprises virtually all children at the ages of 16–17, and thevast majority of children at the ages of 19–20. To make as representative aspossible the analyses of children who lived with a parent, I selected childrenwho were 16–17 when estimating determinants of family resources on accessto upper-secondary education. When discussing access to the postsecondarylevel, I selected children ages 19–20 in each census, recognizing that this agegroup is somewhat less representative of its age cohort than is the 16–17 agegroup living with a parent.

Information on immigration status and gender is available for all youngpeople regardless of whether they lived with a parent. For children who wereliving with parents (the vast majority), two additional variables can be cre-ated. In each Hong Kong census, the two most consistently available meas-ures available for family resources are the school attainment of the child’sparents and the combined income of both parents. Parental education is thebest indicator of the resources children have had available to them over theentire period of their educational trajectory because parents usually com-pleted their educations before the onset of parenthood. Information onparental education is available in all four census years, but information onparents’ income is available only since 1981. Because children of separatedparents lived with mothers more frequently than with fathers, the educationof fathers is missing in many more cases than mother’s education is missing.For this reason, mother’s education is a preferable summary measure offamily cultural resources so as to preserve the maximum number of cases.Parental income is measured as current income, not the income availablewhen the child either entered upper-secondary school (up to three yearspreviously) or postsecondary education (two years earlier). As discussed be-low, when comparing over time I created quartiles and identified whether aparticular child’s parents had incomes within the top, bottom, or one of thetwo middle quartiles.

Tendencies in Educational Attainment Over 30 Years

Irrespective of whether the child lived with a parent, the child’s gender isknown in each census. It is thus possible to trace the changing educationalattainment by all girls and boys who were in Hong Kong during 1971,1981, 1991, and 2001. This 30-year comparison shows the outcome forgirls of Hong Kong’s expansion of education, an expansion made delib-erately by the colonial government, and with minimal public input or sharedcontrol. Because nine years of education have been compulsory during mostof the 1971–2001 period, educational stratification has been seen mostclearly at the postcompulsory level. Under normal circumstances, a childenters the Hong Kong school system at the age of six, and continues toupper-secondary level (entering Form 4) by the age of 15. By the age of 18or 19, a child can gain entrance either to a nondegree certificate program


(some termed ‘‘associate degrees’’) or to a ‘‘first degree’’ (i.e., bachelordegree) program in one of Hong Kong’s universities. In the past, manyforms of training were offered outside of universities, notably careers inprimary school teaching. In more recent years, all teacher training programshave been upgraded and amalgamated into an institution that confers thebachelor degree. For the investigation reported in this article, I calculatedthe rates of upper-secondary and postsecondary (both university degree ornonuniversity certificate) among the sample of children ages 19 to 20 at thetime of the census. Since the definition ‘‘university’’ changed over the 30years, especially with the inclusion of teacher education programs, I usedboth broad and narrow definitions of higher education.

Based on full samples of individuals who were living in Hong Kongduring the census (regardless of whether they lived independently or withtheir parents), I calculated upper-secondary and postsecondary attainmentrates. These rates are presented in Table 1. The overall tendency has beentoward expanded coverage at the upper-secondary level, rising from about31 to 86 percent. This increase is noteworthy when considering that, even in2001, upper-secondary school was neither compulsory nor free of fees. Post-secondary education also increased, though a comparison with 1971 istrickier because in that 1 percent sample only 31 cases were reported ofchildren studying in a university. Taking the figures at face value, the

TABLE1

Educational Attainment of Hong Kong Residents by Ages 19–20

Male Female Total

1971 1% Census SamplePercentage who attained upper-secondary level 32.5 28.6 30.6Percentage who attained ANY type of postsecondary education 6.2 4.5 5.4Percentage who attained university degree program 2.2 1.8 2.01981 5% Census SamplePercentage who attained upper-secondary level 55.4 56.2 55.8Percentage who attained ANY type of postsecondary education 5.2 4.0 4.6Percentage who attained university degree program 1.7 0.9 1.31991 5% Census SamplePercentage who attained upper-secondary level 69.0 84.9 76.8Percentage who attained ANY type of postsecondary education 17.4 20.2 18.8Percentage who attained university degree program 6.2 6.2 6.22001 5% Census Sample n

Percentage who attained upper-secondary level 83.0 88.5 85.8Percentage who attained ANY type of postsecondary education 28.5 33.0 30.8Percentage who attained university degree program 13.1 16.3 14.7

nThe 2001 Census tabulation is limited to individuals who were physically present in Hong Kongat the moment of the census. This restriction facilitates comparison with previous census years,when no information was collected about residents the Census Department termed ‘‘mobile’’who were living temporarily outside of HK.


university attainment rate increased from 2 percent in 1971 to over 17percent among persons ages 19–20 in 2001.

The Transformation of Gender Inequality

The most important insights from the estimated 1971–2001 attainmentrates relate to changes in gender inequality over these 30 years. Within livingmemory, Hong Kong families, in common with those on the mainland andTaiwan, shared patrilocal features and manifest a preference for sons overdaughters. This gender bias was quite apparent in the allocation of scarceresources in the form of school fees and foregone earnings. In the early1970s, Hong Kong girls were doubly disadvantaged as compared with boys,both in terms of continuing to the later years of secondary school and interms of continuing to a university. Thirty years later, the tables had beenturned. In 2001, about 83 percent of boys but 88.5 percent of girls hadattained the upper-secondary level. Of these children, about 18.4 percent ofgirls, compared with 15.7 percent of boys, had continued to a university inHong Kong. This tendency can be appreciated in Figure 1, which plots overtime the ratios of girls’ to boys’ attainment and continuation rates that aregiven in Table 1.

Figure 1 compares girls’ with boys’ rates of attaining upper-secondaryeducation, attaining the broad category of postsecondary education (in-cluding university), and attaining university education specifically. The at-tainment rates for girls, relative to those for boys, show there have beenimportant changes in Hong Kong education and, most likely, in HongKong society as a result. One anomaly is the unexpectedly close parity forpostsecondary education in 1971. However, as previously explained, the cellsizes for university-education girls and boys are very small because of the

0.40.50.60.70.80.91.01.11.21.3

1971 1981 1991 2001

Upper-secondary rate ratio

All postsecondary ratio

Only university rate ratio

Line of parity ofgirls

, / boys

, attainment

FIGURE1

Education Attained by Hong Kong Girls Relative to Attainment by Boys at Ages19–20, by Census Year


smaller 1 percent sample. Discounting this ‘‘decline’’ from 1971 to 1981 ingirls’ access to university, relative to boys, Figure 1 shows a consistentpattern: over just one generation, girls have overtaken boys. To some extent,the increasing rates of ‘‘university’’ attendance by women can be attributedto the fact that, in the past, students attending primary school teachertraining colleges were predominantly women. Notwithstanding this partialexplanation, in the 2001 Census women outnumbered men even in post-secondary programs outside of the university (referred to as ‘‘subdegree’’ or‘‘associate degree’’ programs). These finding are quite consistent with mediareports that, by 2002, women outnumbered men in the law and medicalschools of Hong Kong.

The trend seen over 1991–2001 in Figure 1 is a continuation of pre-viously reported increases from 1971–1991 in girls’ educational attainments(Pong and Post, 1991; Post, 1994; Post and Pong, 1998). The Hong Kongtrend is a sharp contrast from those found by Shu and Bian (2002) formarket-oriented PRC cities. Two complementary explanations can be sug-gested for the advance of Hong Kong girls relative to boys: first, a localdiscourse of human rights emerged in the years leading up to the Handover,and second, consistent with the findings in the case of Hungary by Szeleyi(1998), parents responded to a changed opportunity structure. When dis-advantages to girls diminished in the labor force, parents had no naturalreason not to invest equally in their daughters’ schooling. As in Hungary,Hong Kong women have emerged as wage earners (and sources of old-agesupport) quickly over the last three decades, creating greater incentives toinvest in daughters (Pong, 1991).

The Changing Role of Parental Resources

Turning our attention now to children living with at least one parent,Table 2 presents children’s educational attainment by mother’s educationallevel. In terms of children’s access to the upper-secondary level, Table 2suggests that, between 1971 and 1981, and again between 1981 and 1991,there was narrowing in the gap between children at the extremes of mothers’education. Further multivariate analysis (not presented to conserve space,but available on request) confirms that this diminished association withmother’s education is statistically significant for those years at the 0.01 level.However, there were no significant changes from 1991 to 2001 in theassociation between mother’s education and upper-secondary attainment.The greatest percentage gains during the 1970s occurred among childrenwhose mothers had not completed primary schooling. This trend may beexplained, in part, by the government’s campaign to eliminate child laborand enforce nine years of compulsory education after 1977. From 1981 to2001, children in each of the four groups increased by about 15 percentagepoints their rate of attaining upper-secondary education. In terms of access


TABLE2

RatesofEducationalAttainmentofChildrenAges19–20,byCensusYearandMother’sEducation

Moth

er’s

ed

ucatio

n

Up

per-

Second

ary

Att

ain

mentR

ate

sfo

rC

hild

ren

Ages

16–1

7R

ate

sof

AN

YTy

pe

of

Post

second

ary

for

Child

ren

19–2

0R

ate

sfo

rUniversity

Degre

eP

rogra

mfo

rC

hild

ren

19–2

0

1971

1981

1991

2001

1971

1981

1991

2001

1971

1981

1991

2001

No

schoolin

g21.3

%49.9

%63.2

%66.7

%2.9

%3.5

%11.8

%18.6

%1.0

%1.0

%3.0

%6.3

%C

om

ple

ted

prim

ary

41.1

%61.5

%75.6

%80.1

%8.9

%5.4

%19.8

%27.7

%3.3

%1.6

%5.4

%10.3

%Low

er-

second

ary

school

45.0

%61.3

%76.1

%84.9

%8.3

%9.9

%18.7

%32.3

%1.7

%3.0

%6.3

%13.4

%B

eyo

nd

low

er

second

ary

72.4

%74.0

%88.0

%91.7

%19.1

%12.1

%30.9

%41.6

%14.7

%5.0

%11.1

%21.9

%

NO

TE:In

the

analy

sis

for

1971,only

68

outofth

eto

tal1

,103

child

ren

inth

e1

perc

entcensu

ssa

mp

le(a

ges

19–2

0)had

moth

ers

whose

ed

ucatio

nala

ttain

ment

was

past

the

low

er-

second

ary

leve

l.The

1971

att

ain

ment

rate

sfo

rth

ese

child

ren

should

there

fore

be

inte

rpre

ted

very

cautio

usl

yd

ue

toth

esm

all

cell

size

and

larg

er

stand

ard

err

or.

For

1981

and

1991,a

larg

er

5p

erc

ent

sam

ple

isuse

d,w

ith7,6

54

case

sava

ilab

lein

1981

and

6,2

83

case

sava

ilab

lein

1991.For

2001,

the

full

censu

sis

use

d.

This

inclu

des

147,7

96

case

sof

child

ren

who

were

ages

19–2

0,

and

for

whom

there

was

info

rmatio

nab

out

moth

er’s

ed

ucatio

n.


to university, the trend between 1971 and 1981 is difficult to interpretbecause of the small cell size for students with well-educated mothers in the1 percent sample of 1971, and the change seen over the 1971–1981 decadeis not statistically significant. However, between 1981 and 1991, there was astatistically significant decline in the association between attainment ofpostsecondary or university education, on the one hand, and mother’s ed-ucational level on the other. There was no such continuing diminution inthe role of mother’s education after 1991.

Apart from the cultural resources reflected in mothers’ education, familyincome plays an important role in children’s access, especially into post-secondary education. Although Hong Kong has long benefited from a pro-gressive system of grants and loans to university students, there are manyindirect costs involved in the finance of postsecondary education. Perhapseven more important than the indirect personal costs of financing highereducation, family income matters in terms of providing access to moreexpensive, higher-quality secondary schools and to extra tutorial lessons thatmay be needed to succeed in the still highly competitive joint universityentrance examination. To create an indicator of observable parental income,I recorded as ‘‘zero income’’ the cases of a parent who was not working orwho was missing from the child’s household. I then totaled the reportedincome from all sources in each census year. After totaling the reportedparental income for each year, it is possible to compare across census yearsthe relative participation by children of poorer versus richer parents. In eachcensus year I divided parent’s income into four equal quartiles. Comparisonof attainment within these quartiles across census years offers greater insightthan comparisons of mother’s education categories in the distribution ofeducational opportunity. This is because mother’s education increased overthe 30-year period while, by definition, there will always be equal propor-tions of children in the four parental income quartiles. The results of thiscomparison can be appreciated from Figure 2.

In terms of upper-secondary school attainment, Figure 2 suggests therewas no decline since 1981 in the inequality of access that is associated withparental income. The rates for continuing to upper-secondary educationincreased by about 30 percentage points for each of the four income quar-ters. The persistence of a 20 percentage point gap between top and bottomincome quarters from 1981–2001 appears consistent with the persisting gapbetween categories of mother’s education, which was seen in Table 2 since1971 (except for the large gap in university attainment by mother’s edu-cation categories in 1971, which may be due to a very small sample size).This result was not inevitable. As lower-secondary schooling ceased to dif-ferentiate children by family background, children’s access to upper-sec-ondary schooling might have become more selective in terms of familycultural or material resources (since school fees continued to be levied). Inreality, the uniform growth of upper-secondary schooling across broad in-come groups masks an equalizing trend between these income quartiles of all


children except among those who had recently come to Hong Kong frommainland China, as will be seen in detail below. The upper-secondary at-tainment gaps seen in Table 2 and Figure 2 narrowed among Hong-Kong-born children or those who had lived there at least 10 years.

The relation of parental income to university attainment is quite differentfrom its relation to upper-secondary attainment. In the past decade, a gaphas emerged between the top quarter and the lower three-quarters of thechildren. Note that income inequality is less clearly evident within the bot-tom three-fourths of the parental income distribution, even in the mostrecent census, by which time the gap in university access between thatbottom 75 percent and the top quarter had widened substantially. The firstfinding is consistent with one working hypotheses mentioned at the outsetof this article. However, the finding of equality within the bottom 75 per-cent could not have been predicted by maximally maintained inequality.

Recent Immigration from Mainland China

Parents of children who arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland since1991 are overrepresented in the poorest quarter of the income distribution.These children were also less likely to have continued beyond compulsoryeducation. As can be seen in Figure 3, children who had been born on themainland, but who had come to Hong Kong prior to 1991, attained the

A. Percent of children ages 16−17who had begun upper secondary

45

55

65

75

85

95

1981 1991 2001

B. Percent of children ages 19−20 whohad studied in a Hong Kong university

0

5

10

15

20

25

1981 1991 2001

Poorest quarter

Lower middle

Upper middle

Richest quarter

FIGURE2

Children’s Educational Attainment by Quarters of Total Parental Income


upper-secondary level nearly as often as did children who had been born inHong Kong. By sharp contrast, in comparison with native Hong Kongchildren, only a third as many had attained the upper-secondary level ‘‘ontime’’ among those who arrived in the SAR in 1991 or later. Further anal-ysis, not reported here to conserve space, reveals the role of immigration inthe persisting effects of income and mother’s education. For example,among the Hong Kong children who either were born in the SAR, or whoarrived prior to 1991 (when they were only six or seven), there was a smallerassociation between income and access to upper-secondary school. Amongthese nonimmigrant children, 84 percent of the lowest-income quartile at-tained the upper-secondary level. This attainment rate among the SAR’spoorest children who had lived in Hong Kong more than 10 years was only12 percentage points less than among children of the richest-income quarterof parents.

Figure 3 helps explain a puzzle about mainland Chinese children whowere educated in Hong Kong during the 1990s. In both 1991 and 2001,similar proportions of young people had been born on the mainland. Why,then, following the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong, were mainland-bornchildren less likely to complete secondary school ‘‘on time’’ than had beenthe case in 1991? In part, it was because more mainland children werearriving at older ages, when their opportunity for upward mobility wasalready reduced. Over the 1990s, increasing percentages of immigrants from

A. Percent attaining upper-secondary school level by age 16−17

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

B. Percent attaining university education by age 19−20

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

Born in Hong Kong Immigrated before 1991 Immigrated since 1991

FIGURE3

Educational Attainment in 2001 of Children Born in Hong Kong and of Immigrantsfrom Mainland China


the mainland arrived when their children were less easily socialized, and lessable to continue beyond Hong Kong’s nine years of compulsory schoolingdue to problems with the Cantonese-language environment and unfamil-iarity with the Hong Kong school curriculum.

The cumulative impact of family resources for Hong Kong’s children isreflected most clearly in the different rates of attaining a scarce place in auniversity bachelor degree program. Table 3 and Figure 2 indicate that theabsolute gap (if not relative gap) increased over the 1990s: more advantagedchildren increased their participation far more than did the children ofpoorer parents or less-educated mothers. Immigration does not explain thistendency. Although immigrants from the mainland fared worse than native-born children in terms of gaining access to university, the university attain-ment gap by immigration status did not increase over the 1990s, as it did interms of upper-secondary school attainment. Thus, the evidence from PanelB of Figure 2 and from Table 2 suggests the reversal of an equalizingtendency over the 1980s that cannot be explained by immigration. From1981 to 1991, Hong Kong saw fewer social-class differences in the odds ofattaining a place in its higher-education system (Post, 1996). In the shorterterm, Hong Kong appeared to be among a small number of countries, such

TABLE3

Logistic Regression Analyses of Changing Effect on University Attainment ofMother’s Education and of Top-Income Quarter, 1981–2001

Independent Variable Coefficient S.E. Coefficient S.E.

Census is 1991 (not 1981) 1.20 n n n 0.30 1.82 n n n 0.39Census is 2001 (not 1981) 1.33 n n n 0.28 1.89 n n n 0.36Mother’s years of schooling 0.15 n n n 0.02 — —Parent income top 25% each year — — 1.49 n n 0.60Child is female � 0.37 n 0.20 � 0.36 n 0.20Number siblings living at home � 0.22 n n n 0.07 � 0.24 n n n 0.07Interaction terms

Mother’s education � 1991 � 0.06 n n 0.03 — —Mother’s education � 2001 � 0.03 0.03 — —Top 25% income � 1991 — — � 0.46 n n 0.22Top 25% income � 2001 — — � 0.17 0.21Female � 1991 0.43 n 0.23 0.45 n n 0.23Female � 2001 0.79 n n n 0.21 0.78 n n n 0.21Number siblings � 1991 � 0.02 0.08 � 0.05 0.08Number siblings � 2001 0.09 0.08 0.04 0.08

Constant � 4.16 n n n 0.25 � 3.19 n n n 0.38

nSignificant at 0.1 level; nnsignificant at 0.05 level; n n nsignificant at 0.01 level.

NOTE: The analysis is based on a total of 21,117 cases of children with family information from allthree census samples. To make the analysis comparable with the 5 percent sample sizes thatare available in 1981 and 1991, the 5 percent sample from 2001 has also been used (ratherthan the full census).


as Sweden and the Netherlands, where inequality did not persist but actuallydeclined as educational opportunities were expanded (cf. Shavit andBlossfeld, 1993). If Hong Kong’s trend reversed in recent years, this wouldbe of considerable importance for the broader investigation by sociologistsconcerned with the long-term ability of governments to alter the basis ofstratification through public investment in education. In this case, as well,there would be implications for the current debate about a two-tier higher-education system with public subsidies concentrated at the top.

Multivariate Analysis of Family Resources

To test the hypothesis that family resources became more determinant ofattaining university education over time, I estimated logistic regressionsusing combined 1981, 1991, and 2001 data (income was not available in the1971 1 percent sample). I created interaction terms of the census year with(1) mother’s education and (2) having parents who earned in the top-income quarter during each census year. Because parental resources must beshared among other children living in the home, I also estimated the directand interaction effects of the number of siblings. Finally, to test the sig-nificance of the gender trend seen in Figure 1, I estimated the direct and thetime-period interaction of being female. The results of this analysis aresummarized in Table 3.

The direct effects of each independent variable (mother’s education, pa-rental income, female, and siblings) show the roles that each factor playedduring the omitted reference census year of 1981. The two dummy variablesfor the 1991 and 2001 census year show the net effects of living in either ofthese two later periods, as opposed to living in 1981. The interaction termsshow whether or not there had been significant changes in the effects ofmother’s education, parental income, gender, or sibling size by 1991 or by2001. The direct effects of each variable are all as expected. The negativecoefficients for being female show that girls were at a disadvantage in 1981,but the positive interaction terms of gender with each of the later two censusyears show that this disadvantage was overcome in each of the followingdecades. No significant changes are found in the negative impact of thenumber of siblings: controlling for parental income quarter or for mother’seducation, children who had many siblings were at a disadvantage, whilethose with few brothers or sisters were more likely to attain universityeducation. Notice the discontinuity in the changing effects of mother’seducation and of having top-income quarter parents. As compared with itseffect in 1981, the positive effect of mother’s education in 1991 was sig-nificantly reduced (as seen in the negative and statistically significant in-teraction term). Also, as compared with the effect of parental income in1981, for children in 1991 the advantage of having top-income parents haddeclined significantly. But, by 2001, the effects of either indicator of family


resource were not significantly different than they had been in 1981. In-equality first diminished, then reverted nearly (but not completely) back tothe level of inequality prevalent in 1981.

Should we expect that the role of family resources in university attainmentwill increase in the future, continuing the trend found during the 1991–2001 period? This outcome is far from certain, for at least two reasons. Bothimmigration from mainland China and out-migration of middle-class fam-ilies could accelerate during the coming years. Immigrants may ‘‘push up’’native-born lower classes, displacing them at the bottom. At the same time,wealthier families may either choose to send children to overseas universitiesor to Hong Kong institutions. As already suggested above from the bivariateanalysis seen in Figure 3, by 2001 immigration from China had become animportant determinant of on-time upper-secondary school attainment and,ultimately, of gaining access to a Hong Kong university.

Out-migration and return-migration will also shape the future of edu-cational opportunity. The analyses reported up to this point have been onlyfor children who were present in Hong Kong at the time of the census, sincethis is the only population that can be compared across census years. But it ispossible for 2001 to consider the larger population of all children who weresaid by household heads normally to live within the household. At the timeof the census in March 2001, about 5 percent of the 19–20-year-old chil-dren in this larger group were overseas (not including mainland China).Among this overseas group, about 70 percent were studying in a university.At the same time, a much larger number of children were in Hong Kongpursuing some type of nonuniversity education after completing the upper-secondary level. Children in this group will be the future consumers ofHong Kong’s emerging ‘‘associate degree.’’ Where do the students comefrom who pursue each of the three postsecondary alternatives? Figure 4offers an answer to this question. Overseas university students are predom-inantly those from upper-income parents. By contrast, postsecondary studyin Hong Kong outside of university degree programs was distributed moreequally among income quarters. Top-income families were outnumbered bythose from the upper-middle group, and even the poorest students were wellrepresented in this alternative. This may be problematic for Hong Kong’shigher education reformists, since the ‘‘associate degree’’ option is expectedto be financed by fees from users rather than sponsored by the government.In 2001, those children most able to afford user fees were likely to attendeither an overseas university or a government-funded degree program inHong Kong, not an associate degree program.

Conclusions and Implications for Future Research

Aside from their intrinsic interest for social scientists, Hong Kong’s his-torical tendencies in educational stratification have relevance to a current


policy debate over finance of postsecondary education. Public support forthe universities owned and operated by the government has been among themost generous in the world. In 2001, not including capital or researchexpenditures, the government channeled to universities the equivalent ofUS$20,000 per student, much more than the average US$3,000 spent bythe government on each primary student, or the average of US$4,000 spentfor each secondary student. It was also far more than the average ofUS$6,000 in student university fees, especially when considering that morethan half of these fees were indirectly paid by government grants to studentsthrough the Financial Assistance Agency, and that most of the rest wasfinanced through low-interest government-guaranteed loans. Almost sincetaking office after the Handover, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Mr. TungChee Hwa, has faced mounting deficits as the Hong Kong economy turnedsharply downward. With unemployment rising, in 2000 he presented a planto expand the participation by Hong Kong’s younger generation in post-secondary education from the current 25 percent to an eventual 60 percent.Tung hoped this would stimulate a knowledge economy that could competewith Singapore and Shanghai, as Hong Kong’s manufacturing sector wasshifted to neighboring Guangdong Province. Even in 2001 the dilemma foradvocates of this plan was how future expansion would be paid for, given thehistorically high level of government funding. Then, in the wake of theSARS epidemic, an economic crisis led to draconian cuts in university sup-port, as much as 20 percent at one institution in 2004. To expand accesswithout funds, the government has proposed that the majority of future

0

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Associate or sub-degree in HK

University bachelordegree in HK

Overseas universitydegree program

Perc

enta

ge o

f ch

ildre

n ag

es 1

9−20

Poorest quarter

Lower-middle quarter

Upper-middle quarter

Richest quarter

FIGURE4

March 2001 Postsecondary Study of Children Ages 19–20, By Income Quarter


postsecondary students do not pursue a bachelor degree. Instead, they wouldbe trained through shorter, self-financed programs. In this policy context,trends in the gender, the family origins, and the immigration status of thosewho gain admission to Hong Kong’s publicly financed universities is of po-litical importance. If, during recent years, Hong Kong’s children tended toobtain more equal access to its bachelor-degree-granting university system,then the disproportionate concentration of government funding in these in-stitutions will be seen as fair and beneficial to all. If this trend has not occurred,however, then the proposal for a ‘‘two-track’’ system will lose legitimacy.

The experience of Hong Kong also offers partial confirmation of thehypotheses associated with the concept of maximally maintained inequality(MMI). Ultimately, by 2001, as seen in Table 3, there were no significantchanges in the effects of family resources in getting a university degree.However, the complexities of Hong Kong’s trends illustrate the limitationsof MMI as well as its reach. First, over the 1981–1991 period, an unex-pected decline in educational stratification occurred. It is possible that theability of advantaged families to send their children to overseas universitiesopened greater options in Hong Kong institutions. But government ac-tion—virtually total subsidy of university education—was essential to makethese options a reality. A further contribution of the results from HongKong is to show that gender inequality is far from a permanent feature ofChinese society. Hong Kong much more closely resembles Taiwan thancities on the mainland. By 2003, women substantially outnumbered men inHong Kong’s medical and law schools.

Notwithstanding this earlier trend to equality of opportunity, a return-migration seems to be pushing the middle class out to nondegree programsor out of higher education altogether. As already discussed, this push fromthe upper strata was accompanied by a push from below by new immigrantsfrom the mainland who arrived with few resources to succeed in the HongKong system. Thus, one warning from the Hong Kong findings would be ofa new emergent underclass. Recent immigrant children will be likely totransmit educational disadvantages to their own children, who may come tooccupy the lower-status occupations once performed by Hong Kong res-idents. Although parental income will continue to play a role in promotingaccess to Hong Kong education, immigration status may eventually becomeeven more decisive. Despite having a common Chinese ethnicity, HongKong, like other border zones, may develop immigrant enclaves. Similarly tothe ‘‘segmented assimilation’’ seen among some immigrant groups in theUnited States (Portes and Manning, 1994), an occupational niche that wasformerly occupied by lower-class Hong Kong workers may be taken byrecent immigrants. This would allow those displaced, locally educated HongKongers, to step up the status rung were it not for the downward pressure ofupper-class students who, in past years, might have left Hong Kong for theireducation. A return-migration of children from the most affluent families islikely to push down, and out of Hong Kong’s universities, the children from


the middle class. In the future, access to university degree programs could bemore limited than the vastly increased numbers of applicants. In this case,the children of the middle class, already ‘‘squeezed’’ by upward and down-ward pressures, will be channeled into the new ‘‘associate degree’’ programs,further displacing the children of newer immigrants. Although recent im-migrants are poorly organized, the squeezed middle class could be a sourceof political change, assuming that they will eventually be given a voice indecision making.

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