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

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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.