Abstract:

In recent years, access to top universities and its regional disparity have become a major concern. With government initiatives launched to improve the quality of higher education through building world class universities, the research focus is shifting from access to higher education to access to high quality top universities. This paper first defines the criteria for top universities in China. According to three Chinese universities rankings and four international universities rankings from 2011 to 2015, 34 Chinese universities are regarded as top universities in China. In addition, considering several factors in the enrollment procedures in college entrance examinations, this paper employs the Principle Component Analysis method to construct the index of the access to top universities. Based on province level descriptive statistics analysis of the access index from both longitudinal trends and horizontal regional differences, three empirical results were produced. First, the access to the 34 top universities has been increasing year by year at a moderate race, i.e. by about 4.57%. It is true that an increasing quota has been allocated to west China. However, as more and more students from west China participate in the college entrance examination, the increased access to top universities was attenuated. Therefore, the effectiveness of quota policy on bridging the regional gap is relatively weak. Moreover, as the relevant compensatory policies target some provinces in the middle and western area, provinces in other area, like Guangdong, Hainan, Chongqing and Sichuan, have less support from the central government. Compared with the increasing number of students entering for the college entrance exam, the access to top universities in these provinces is decreasing. Secondly, while in 2015 the regional disparity was reduced, it has been greater in the other years. The phenomenon is most obvious in east China, where the widening gaps in school age population, the number of examinees and enrollment quotas have aggravated the regional disparity. In terms of the access to top universities throughout the years, cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin have their comparative advantages, while in some other provinces like Guangdong and Hainan, the access is reducing. Finally, using a fixed effect model, this paper continues to explore the factors that might influence the access index. Results show that, when controlling provincial endowment, though quota reallocation policy may have significant positive effect on the access to the top universities, it contributes little to reducing the access inequality in different provinces. Rather, the economic development becomes the key factor in explaining the variance of access. Therefore, with the widening inequality of the economic development in different provinces, the inequality of opportunity might be greater as well.

Key words: access to higher education, inequality at regional level； equality of opportunity； top universities