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

当代年轻人在向上流动的渴望中面临着一个悖论：高等教育越来越成为一种经济上必要的投资，而它得到的补贴越来越少，短期内更难利用。长期以来，建立和维持稳定的中产阶级一直被认为对经济健康至关重要，而对向上流动的可行追求是衡量这一制度信心的关键指标。这个项目培训研究生进行严谨的、有经验的科学实地考察，问题是受过教育的年轻人如何能够在面临重大结构性挑战时保持向上流动的愿望。这些发现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·卢米斯在芝加哥大学詹妮弗·科尔博士的指导下，研究了生活在大城市边缘的日益壮大的受过教育但非正规就业的农村毕业生阶层是如何应对向上流动的渴望与当前贫困和不稳定就业现实之间的紧张关系的。这项研究特别在中国(彝族)这样的群体中进行了研究，这是探索这一问题的理想地点，因为自20世纪70年代末实行改革开放政策以来，这里的中产阶级迅速发展。许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，他们往往会把所有的积蓄都花在确保孩子上大学和在城市打工上。政府在1999年决定从根本上扩大大学系统，通过市场化使高等教育更容易接受，这本身就鼓励了将教育作为一种社会流动手段的转变。然而，尽管学费学位的可得性更高，但中国经济并没有创造足够的白领工作岗位来吸收大量涌入的毕业生。然而，作为知青，这一群体中的成员仍然对自己有能力进入中国的“高素质”劳动力抱有希望。通过对这一不断增长的人口进行深入的民族志研究，该项目将探索被边缘化的农村青年如何理解并遵循他们在当代城市中国中参与社会的条件，以及他们在这样做的过程中可能再现或挑战价值和社会等级的性质的方式。方法包括在北京及周边的四个不同地点进行参与者观察和访谈。

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.