The formation of educational expectations is crucial for students’ future academic achievement and social mobility, but it depends on students’ capacity to sustain their subjective expectations, so that their expectation will truly motivate individual agency and self-efficacy. Social class is an important predictor factor influencing educational expectations in sociological and educational fields. The traditional literature has largely found a negative relationship between family social background and educational aspirations. This is mainly because Rational Action Theory suggests that individuals’ expectations are based on their family background and academic performance. Children from disadvantaged family tend to lower their educational expectations due to the pressure of college fees and their own academic level. However, a different voice is beginning to emerge in the current literature on educational expectations. It claims that disadvantaged classes do not have low expectations. This is mainly due to the specificity of cultural contexts and family climate. For example, a deprived home environment can sometimes also inspire greater resilience and educational aspirations for students.

Some articles that focus on academic behavior and performance of Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), they find that disadvantaged families in most CHC countries or regions, including China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, tend to have higher educational expectations because of the perceived importance of education and schooling. Even when these students migrate to developed Western countries, these immigrant families have far higher educational expectations and academic standards than other immigrants from other countries or regions (e.g. Africa/Latin America/East Europe). More recently, some of the emerging literature has begun to explain this high expectation from a moralizing perspective, arguing that disadvantaged students treat high expectations as a mechanism or label for their own signaling actions. They believe that higher educational expectation is a good indicator for good students, son (or daughter), person.

The inner Confucian Heritage Culture also differs considerably in its examination systems, unique climate and educational system contexts compared to Western cultural contexts. Within the Confucian Heritage Culture, some researchers have used the concept of education fever to describe the popular pursuit of education success. In the Chinese context, extremely selection based on the national college entrance examination (Gaokao) is an important feature of higher education admissions, but the system has attracted both praise and disparagement. For example, people who fail in their studies or fail to get into university are perceived as losers. Although the reform of Chinese national college entrance examination is still underway, the basic feature of one-chance examination but for whole life are essentially unchanged.

Thus, based on data from 4781 senior high school graduates in a city in Guizhou, China, this study analysed the impact of SES on students’ educational expectations in the context of Chinese Gaokao system. In particular, it revealed the phenomenon of shrinking educational expectations of students with low socioeconomic status. These students were more likely to suffer from the failure of examination, which negatively affected their personal short-term and long-term educational expectations. In contrast, high socioeconomic status students hold stable educational expectations, because their families can serve as a strong support for future success, whether they failed in the examination.

Finally, this study addresses the relationship between the examination system, individual educational expectations, and socioeconomic status. It also dialectically discusses how the examination system became a socially revered culture in the Confucian Heritage Culture. The findings provide a reference for countries with similar examination systems and for researchers concerned with educational expectations and educational opportunities for low socioeconomic status groups.

Our study used self-collected student survey data and administrative data from the education department. The sample consisted of graduating high school students in a county-level city of Guizhou Province, China, covering all seven public and private high schools in the city. The project and questionnaire were ethically reviewed by the academic committee of School of Education, Renmin University of China, and the permission was also obtained from the city's education bureau. The survey was conducted in two rounds. After data matching, the first round of surveys involved a sample of 4,781 students, accounting for 69.93% of the number of students who registered for the college entrance examination in the city that year. The second round of surveys successfully tracked and matched 2,166 students. The main variable involved in the study was student’s socio-economic status, which is a composite of four variables including household registration, subjective family economic conditions, parental education level, parental occupational hierarchy. In addition, we classified educational expectations into two categories, one is access expectation, which reflects the quality level of the HEI that students expect to enter. The other category is sequential expectation, which is represented using the level of the educational qualification the student expects to receive. We used Stata 14 to process the data in this study. The two types of educational expectations were the dependent variables, SES was the core independent variable, and the control variables included sex, ethnicity, sibling, retaking Gaokao, course track in high school, A-test score or Gaokao score, and high school variables. When the educational expectation was a continuous variable, the ordinary least squares regression model was used to analyse the impact of SES; when the educational expectation was a dummy variable, the probit model was used for analysis.

The study found some differences in access expectation and sequential expectation among students of different SES before Gaokao, with higher educational expectations among high-SES students. However, this statistically significant difference does not have economic explanatory utility. The largest difference in expectations across SES students is that for sequential expectation, low-SES students have a higher probability of expecting an undergraduate education, while high-SES students have a higher probability of expecting master education. The effect of SES on educational expectation was significantly enhanced after experiencing Gaokao. SES had a significant negative effect on both of educational expectations. The effect of SES on sequential expectation was more significant. For students with low socioeconomic status, there was a higher probability of expecting to enter a vocational HEI or to achieve higher vocational education and undergraduate education. At the same time, they were significantly less likely to expect to enter first-tier HEIs and significantly less likely to expect to receive master education and doctoral education. We call this change the phenomenon of shrinking educational expectations. Finally, this study analysed the effect of SES on the change of educational expectation before and after Gaokao. There is a significant interaction between SES scores and Gaokao scores, with the negative impact of SES diminishing as Gaokao scores improve. But this also means that low-SES students with low test scores are disadvantaged, experiencing a double whammy from SES and the college entrance examination, and significantly lowering their long-term future educational expectations, e.g., from to receive undergraduate education to higher vocational education. The fragile “educational dreams” they had hoped to achieve are dashed with Gaokao. However, those peers with high SES were able to maintain a stable, high level of educational expectations to achieve their future educational goals.

Alexander, K., Bozick, R., & Entwisle, D. (2008). Warming Up, Cooling Out, or Holding Steady? Persistence and Change in Educational Expectations After High School. Sociology of Education, 81(4), 371-396. Anders, J. (2017). The Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Changes in Young People’s Expectations of Applying to University. Oxford Review of Education, 43(4), 381-401. Asha Cooper, M. (2008). Dreams Deferred?: The Relationship Between Early and Later Postsecondary Educational Aspirations Among Racial/Ethnic Groups. Educational Policy, 23(4), 615-650. Byun, S. Y., Meece, J. L., Irvin, M. J., & Hutchins, B. C. (2012). The Role of Social Capital in Educational Aspirations of Rural Youth. Rural Sociol, 77(3), 355-379. Clycq, N., Ward Nouwen, M. A., & Vandenbroucke, A. (2014). Meritocracy, Deficit Thinking and the Invisibility of The System: Discourses on Educational Success and Failure. British Educational Research Journal, 40(5), 796-819. Gu, X., & Yeung, W.-J. J. (2020). Hopes and Hurdles: Rural Migrant Children’s Education in Urban China. Chinese Sociological Review, 52(2), 199-237. Khattab, N. (2015). Students’ Aspirations, Expectations and School Achievement: What Really Matters? British Educational Research Journal, 41(5), 731-748. Kim, J.-S., & Bang, H. (2017). Education fever: Korean Parents’ Aspirations for Their Children’s Schooling and Future Career. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 25(2), 207-224. Li, W., & Xie, Y. (2020). The Influence of Family Background on Educational Expectations: A Comparative Study. Chinese Sociological Review, 52(3), 269-294. Liu, A., & Xie, Y. (2016). Why do Asian Americans academically outperform Whites?–The cultural explanation revisited. Social Science Research, 58, 210-226. Marginson, S. (2010). Higher education in East Asia and Singapore: Rise of the Confucian Model. Higher Education, 61(5), 587-611. Reynolds, J. R., & Pemberton, J. (2001). Rising College Expectations among Youth in the United States: A Comparison of the 1979 and 1997 NLSY. The Journal of Human Resources, 36(4), 703-726. Thapar-Bjorkert, S., & Sanghera, G. (2010). Social Capital, Educational Aspirations and Young Pakistani Muslim Men and Women in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The Sociological Review, 58(2), 244-264. Winterton, M. T., & Irwin, S. (2012). Teenage Expectations of Going Tto University: The Ebb and Flow of Influences from 14 to 18. Journal of Youth Studies, 15(7), 858-874. Wu, X., & Treiman, D. J. (2004). The Household Registration System and Social Stratification in China: 1955-1996. Demography, 41(2), 363-384. XIANG, X. (2018). My Future, My Family, My Freedom: Meanings of Schooling for Poor, Rural Chinese Youth. Harvard Educational Review, 88(1), 81-102.