Editor’s Introduction: Equity in Postgraduate Education in China

growth in higher education opportunity has brought greater equality of access to postgraduate education. His research draws on insights from several widely used theo-ries in educational sociology, such as maximally maintained inequality theory, effectively maintained inequality theory, and Boudon ’ s rational choice theory. The data set he uses for his analysis is the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), jointly supported by professors at Chinese Renmin University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From this national data set, Li focuses his analysis on a subsample selected from a group of universities in Beijing, the capital city of China. Based on these data, he finds that around one-third of university graduates in Beijing choose to pursue postgraduate degrees. Students from selective universities such as those included in the 211 Project are more likely to enroll in graduate school, and students ’ family background is also an important predictor of whether they pursue postgraduate education. Li also finds from his analysis that students ’ academic performance and the types of universities they come from are both important mediating variables in explaining the relationships