In recent decades, school choice has emerged as a hallmark of neoliberal education policies across many Western nations, promoting competition and market mechanisms to supposedly enhance educational quality and accessibility. However, China’s latest school choice reform, termed the Synchronous Admission Reform (SAR), represents a significant departure from this global trend. By restricting parents’ autonomy to select elite private schools known as minban schools, the SAR embodies an antineoliberal approach that seeks to recalibrate the relationship between education, markets, and social equity. This sweeping reform not only disrupts established patterns in China’s schooling market but also reshapes parental strategies, perpetuating a complex interplay between policy intentions and entrenched social dynamics.
Initially, the SAR’s introduction heralded a formidable restructuring of China’s schooling landscape. The reform curtailed the enrollment autonomy of elite minban schools by incorporating them into the same geographically bound, test-free admission system that applies to public schools. This elimination of private schools’ independent admission processes was designed to prioritize broader public interests over market competition and reduce the influence of economic capital in school admissions. The anticipated outcome was a narrowing of parental choice, compelling families to compete on more equitable terms. However, this first phase of reform paradoxically heightened parental uncertainty and decision-making difficulty, as families faced a drastically reduced palette of options and diminished leverage over admissions pathways.
Contrary to the reform’s aspirations, parents rapidly adapted to the new field conditions, marking the reform’s second phase. This adaptation galvanized a shift in parental strategies that, while novel, continued to operate within the broader neoliberal logic of education competition and social distinction. Where families previously relied heavily on buying real estate in desirable catchment areas combined with mobilizing diverse forms of capital to secure elite school placement, they now supplemented these tactics with an element of “luck”—a seemingly random factor that masked deliberate manipulations of social and cultural capitals. Parents thus transitioned from strategies rooted in predictable capital investment to more nuanced and precarious approaches that reconfigured chance as an active resource.
This evolution also signaled a transformation from interschool differentiation—choosing between distinct schools based on reputation and exclusivity—to promoting intraschool distinctions, emphasizing the differentiation of student groups within the same educational institution. Under the SAR, minban schools, stripped of enrollment autonomy, responded by intensifying internal academic tracking and streaming, thereby reinforcing subtle but potent forms of segregation within supposedly more equitable systems. This internal stratification of students reflects parental efforts to preserve social hierarchies even when public admission rules level the external playing field.
Moreover, the reform underscored a critical tension concerning cultural capital. Parents shifted from merely accumulating cultural knowledge and credentials to actively repairing perceived mismatches between their own cultural capital and the evolving demands of the education system. This process involved recalibrating their social networks, familiarity with institutional rules, and symbolic resources to navigate opaque admission pathways effectively. The elaborate cultural “repair” efforts highlight a persistent habitus grounded in score-based exclusion and distinction, as elucidated by scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Stephen Ball, who demonstrate how educational competition reinforces social stratification even under ostensibly neutral policies.
Notably, these sophisticated parental tactics reveal the limited transformative impact of the SAR on the broader “social world” shaped by neoliberal logics. While the Reform sought to dismantle market-driven educational inequalities at the junior school level, it failed to disrupt the meritocratic accountability systems underpinning senior high school and university admissions. These higher-level stages continue to evaluate students based on academic performance, sustaining competitive pressures that compel parents to engage in strategic school choice to maximize their children’s educational trajectories. The logic of meritocracy thus perpetuates educational inequality under a different guise.
Economic capital remains a cornerstone of contemporary school choice strategies, especially as parents increasingly prioritize purchasing housing within elite public school catchment areas. The rising costs of real estate near reputed schools intensify financial barriers and amplify economic disparities among families. This phenomenon underscores the persistence of socioeconomic inequities that the SAR sought to diminish, illustrating the complex interdependence between education policy, housing markets, and social stratification.
The role of “luck” in parental discourse warrants particular scrutiny. Although parents often characterize their admission successes as fortunate, deeper analysis reveals that this “luck” frequently stems from well-cultivated embodied cultural capital—precisely the social know-how and strategic deployment of rules and networks that enable advantage within the system. Furthermore, social capital, manifested in connections to education bureau personnel or influential figures, effectively engineers this “luck.” By framing systemic advantages as serendipitous, parents obscure structural inequalities, perpetuating a veneer of fairness that conceals enduring privilege.
The internal streaming policies within schools further complicate the egalitarian aims of the SAR. By instituting academic stratification in classroom groupings and programs, elite minban schools collaborate covertly with parents to sustain social distinction despite more uniform external admission procedures. This intraschool segregation exacerbates educational inequities by concentrating resources and opportunities in selective tracks, effectively producing new forms of exclusion that evade straightforward policy interventions.
Parental strategies are not deployed in isolation but operate in a dynamic interplay, with families employing multiple methods concurrently or sequentially to optimize outcomes. For example, when a lottery-based system for minban school admission fails, parents simultaneously invest in purchasing catchment-area housing or intensify cultural capital “repairs,” demonstrating adaptive resilience in the face of shifting rules. This multiplicity of tactics highlights how families leverage varying resources to circumvent constraints and secure educational advantages, revealing the adaptability of social actors within constrained policy environments.
Crucially, the efficacy and diversity of parental strategies correlate with the volume and composition of their available capital. Wealthier families with expansive social networks and robust cultural capital can navigate the reformed school choice field more effectively, employing a wider array of approaches. Conversely, families with limited resources face compounded disadvantages, as the system’s subtle complexities demand significant capital investment and familiarity that many cannot muster. This capital-dependent stratification perpetuates and potentially deepens inequality, despite reform attempts to the contrary.
The case of China’s SAR offers a compelling empirical example of the challenges inherent in reforming education systems entrenched in neoliberal rationales and social hierarchies. It highlights the difficulties of disentangling market-like competition from deeply embedded parental aspirations, social norms, and cultural practices that valorize academic distinction and social mobility through education. The measured success in curbing some market elements is tempered by the reform’s unintended consequences, including the reinforcement of economic barriers, opaque advantage mechanisms, and nuanced segregation practices.
From a broader policy standpoint, the Chinese experience underscores the limitations of top-down reforms that alter institutional procedures without simultaneously addressing the underlying social capital dynamics and meritocratic pressures that drive educational inequality. Efforts to democratize school choice must consider the multifaceted nature of parental agency and habitus, as well as the complex interplay between housing markets, symbolic capital, and social networks. Only by acknowledging and mitigating these interconnected forces can reforms hope to create genuinely equitable educational landscapes.
In sum, the synchronous admission reform represents a critical intervention challenging neoliberal principles in education by restricting private school autonomy and reducing overt market competition. Yet, the persistence of parental investment strategies, adaptive tactics, and systemic inequalities reveals that the “game” of school choice endures, albeit in more intricate and capital-intensive forms. As China’s middle-class parents play this new game, they navigate an evolving field where social distinction, meritocracy, and capital converge to reproduce educational stratification even amid reform.
This nuanced understanding contributes to global debates on education policy, social equity, and neoliberalism by illustrating how reforms may simultaneously moderate market influences while preserving inequities through adaptive social practices. The Chinese SAR case invites scholars and policymakers to rethink assumptions about choice, competition, and social justice in education, advocating for more comprehensive approaches that transform not only institutional rules but also the broader social frameworks in which schooling operates.
Subject of Research:
School choice reform in China, focusing on parental strategies and the impact of the Synchronous Admission Reform on access to elite schools.
Article Title:
The new game of choosing elite schools: parental accounts regarding China’s synchronous admission reform.
Article References:
Zhong, C., Tse, T.KC. The new game of choosing elite schools: parental accounts regarding China’s synchronous admission reform. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 1828 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-06105-y
Image Credits: AI Generated
