A growing body of literature explores the effect of higher education on the urban–rural divide in China. Despite an increasing number of rural students gaining access to college, little is known about their performance in college or their job prospects after graduation. Using nationally representative data from over 40,000 urban and rural college students, we examine rural students’ college performance and estimate the impact of rural status on students’ first job wages in comparison to their urban peers. Our results indicate that once accepted into college, rural students perform equally as well, if not better, than their urban counterparts. Additionally, we discovered that rural students earn a 6.2 per cent wage premium compared to their urban counterparts in their first job after graduation. Our findings suggest the importance of expanding access to higher education for rural students, as it appears to serve as an equalizer between urban and rural students despite their significantly different backgrounds.

Since the 1990s, not only have China's universities become more in line with global standards but they now set them in some areas. This paper looks at how the production of space in Chinese higher education is employed in “new era” China to manage contested sites of globalization. From the spatial practice of scholarship to the representational spaces that map the educational bureaucracy, the production of space in Chinese higher education helps to organize social relations. This paper argues that the production of space in Chinese higher education is used to manage conflicts between global flows and localization as well as to serve national priorities. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions of the globalization of higher education and cultural studies of space and spatiality in contemporary China.

This article takes advantage of three new big historical datasets to identify four salient features of the Chinese academe during the Republic of China. First, it was highly international in terms of training. Second, the proportion of female students was unexpectedly large. Third, there was a heavy emphasis on STEM subjects. Finally, the social and spatial origins of China's university students and university faculty members changed from a national population of civil servant families to business and professional families largely from Jiangnan and the Pearl River Delta. The datasets are the China University Student Dataset – Republic of China, which includes almost half of all students to graduate from a Chinese university during the first half of the 20th century; the China University Student Dataset – Overseas, which includes the vast majority of all Chinese students to graduate from a North American, European or Japanese university during this same period; and the China University Employee Dataset, which includes almost all university faculty members in China, 1941–1950.

Situated in the broader context of educational aid for Tibet and higher education reform in China, this article examines efforts to develop higher education in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Based on document analyses, observations and interviews, we interrogate the thoughts and actions of university officials in the TAR when responding to the state's call for the creation of “double first-class” (shuangyiliu 双一流) universities and disciplines. Our study identifies two main strategies adopted by university officials: capitalizing on the plateau's unique geography and China's system of preferential ethnic policies. University administrators hope to use the TAR's unique and strategic location as a springboard for curriculum and research development, while drawing on aid and assistance from the central government and partner universities. We conclude that the future of higher education in the TAR is highly dependent on external assistance and that the region faces an uphill battle in building a truly world-class university.

Due to their age and lifestyle, female students in general are at an increased risk of various forms of sexual violence. Particular sociocultural contexts also form the background of gender-based violence in professional and academic structures. Yet despite institutional and legal efforts to protect (potential) survivors of sexual violence from primary (and secondary) victimization, persistent assaults demonstrate the reluctance of organizations and individuals to fully accept women’s experiences as being physically and psychologically harmful. Based on quantitative and qualitative data obtained in the context of the European research project “Gender-Based Violence, Stalking and Fear of Crime”,1 this article presents a comparative analysis of the prevalence of sexual violence, feelings of safety (or a lack thereof) and the reasons for (non-)disclosure for five European countries. A dataset of about 21,000 responses from German, British, Italian, Spanish and Polish students indicates that sexualized violence is a major problem at universities and that it has yet to be recognized as such. This – added to the fact that it is generally suppressed or concealed by universities – makes it society’s problem as well. The article discusses widespread social myths about victims and perpetrators, the role of the new media in victimization, and the issues of universities’ responsibility for their students (through institutional policy and specific responses to incidents of gender-based violence). The results presented here demonstrate the contradictory perceptions that students have in regard to their experiences and the nature of sexualized violence in an academic environment.

Situating external engagement within the broader context of developments in Western higher education (HE) and technologies that are changing many aspects of academic life, this research note draws on the experiences of a large number of China scholars to assess the merits of Twitter for individual academics and the field as whole. Celebrating its tenth anniversary in March 2016, Twitter has shaken off its earlier image of celebrity stalking and inane ephemera and has become a tool used by many professionals working on China. Despite initial scepticism, many academics have recognized the utility of Twitter for various professional activities, including networking, increasing research visibility, gathering and disseminating information, and building a public profile. As external engagement activities become a routine expectation for academics in many Western universities, social media like Twitter have drawn attention as potentially useful tools. However, there are numerous obstacles to effective use, which this note addresses.

In this commentary on the research note by Wang Xiaobing, Chengfang Liu, Linxiu Zhang, Yaojiang Shi and Scott Rozelle, “College is a rich, Han, urban, male club: research notes from a census survey of four tier one colleges in China,” I address several caveats in using the relative disparity index in assessing the extent of inequality in access to higher education. Based on these discussions, I point out the potential limitations existing in the empirical study of Wang and colleagues, and reassess the extent of disparity in college education opportunities in contemporary China using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. Although the descriptive patterns consolidate the study of Wang and colleagues, only household registration status is significantly associated with the likelihood of attending college. These findings indicate that disparities per gender, economic status, and ethnicity based on a limited number of colleges are likely to be subject to sampling errors. Finally, no interaction effects between socio-demographic factors are detected. I offer some reflections on the disproportionality approach in the research of education inequality.