Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structural Constraints to Economic Mobility Among Highly Educated Youth

当代青年在追求向上流动的过程中面临着一个悖论：高等教育正日益成为一项经济上必要的投资，而它得到的补贴却越来越少，而且在短期内更难实现资本化。长期以来，建立和维持一个稳定的中产阶级一直被视为经济健康的关键，而对向上流动的可行追求是对这一体系信心的关键衡量标准。这个项目训练一名研究生进行严谨的、以经验为基础的科学实地考察，探讨受过教育的年轻人在面临重大结构性挑战时如何能够保持向上流动的愿望。研究结果将对对可持续经济发展感兴趣的政策制定者、规划者和实践者有用。罗伯特·迈尔斯·卢米斯（Robert Miles Loomis）在芝加哥大学詹妮弗·科尔（Jennifer Cole）博士的指导下，研究了生活在大城市边缘的受过良好教育但不定期就业的农村毕业生是如何在向上流动的愿望与当前贫困和不稳定就业的现实之间进行谈判的。这项研究特别针对中国的一个这样的群体（“蚁族”），这是一个探索这个问题的理想场所，因为自20世纪70年代末启动“改革开放”政策以来，中国的中产阶级迅速发展。很多人现在认为教育是摆脱贫困的唯一途径。尤其是农村的父母，经常花光他们所有的积蓄，以确保他们的孩子上大学和在城市地区找到工作。1999年，政府决定从根本上扩大大学体系，通过市场化使高等教育更容易获得，这一决定本身就鼓励了把教育作为社会流动的一种手段。然而，尽管学费学位越来越多，但中国经济并没有创造足够的白领工作来吸收大量涌入的毕业生。然而，这一群体的成员，作为受过教育的青年，仍然对自己进入中国“高质量”劳动力市场的能力充满希望。通过对这一不断增长的人口进行深入的民族志研究，该项目将探索边缘化的农村青年如何理解并根据他们在当代中国城市社会参与的条件采取行动，以及他们在这样做时可能复制或挑战价值和社会等级本质的方式。方法包括参与者观察和在北京及周边四个不同地点的访谈。

Contemporary youth are confronted with a paradox in their aspirations for upward mobility: higher education is increasingly becoming an economically necessary investment, while it is becoming less subsidized and more difficult to capitalize on in the short term. The establishment and maintenance of a stable middle class has long been regarded as essential to the health of the economy, and the viable pursuit of upward mobility is a key measure of confidence for that system. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how educated youth are able to maintain aspirations for upward mobility in the face of significant structural challenges. The findings will be useful to policymakers, planners, and practitioners interested in sustainable economic development. Robert Miles Loomis, under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Cole at the University of Chicago, examines how members of a growing underclass of educated but irregularly employed rural graduates living on the margins of major metropolises negotiate the tension between aspirations for upward mobility and present realities of poverty and precarious employment. The research specifically such one such group in China (yi zu; or "ant tribe"), an ideal site for exploring this question as it has seen a rapidly developing middle class since initiating its policies for "reform and opening" (gaige kaifang) in the late-1970s. Much of the population now sees education as only way out of poverty. Rural parents, especially, often spend all of their savings to ensure that their children attend college and land jobs in urban areas. The turn to education as a means of social mobility was itself encouraged by the government's decision in 1999 to radically expand the university system, making higher education more accessible through marketization. Yet despite the greater availability of tuition-based degrees, the Chinese economy has not generated enough white-collar jobs to absorb this massive influx of graduates. Yet members of this group, as educated youth, remain hopeful about their ability to enter into China's "high quality" workforce. By providing an in depth ethnographic look at this growing population, this project will explore how marginalized rural youth make sense of and act upon the terms of their social participation in contemporary urban China, and the ways they may be reproducing or challenging the nature of value and social hierarchy as they do so. Methods include participant observation and interviews at four different sites in and around Beijing.