Class differences between students’ opting for doing an associate degree in community college in Hong Kong: different states of cultural capital and their conversion

This article seeks to utilise Bourdieu’s conceptual framework published in 1984 to make sense of the educational decision of so-called ‘loser’ students in contemporary Hong Kong. The last few decades have witnessed a continuous expansion of education in many industrial-capitalist societies; yet, it is well documented that a class gap in educational attainment persists (e.g. Shavit and Blossfeld; Schofer and Meyer; see the collections in Torres and Antikainen). Many sociologists are agreed that such persistent class differential in educational attainment could be understood as a result of class-related distortions in the educational process (Marshall et al.). Indeed, a number of concepts have been proposed and many explanations have been advanced to explain the persistence of such a class gap and illustrate how this takes place (cf. Moore). No one would ever doubt the necessity of sociologists’ effort to illustrate how children of an advantaged class (usually labelled as the middle class) are much better able than their disadvantaged class counterparts (usually labelled as the working class) at each branching point – where social selection takes place (usually in the form of public examinations) to decide who could stay on in the education system and who could not after that point – to take advantage of an educational expansion so that the former would eventually attain a higher level of education. More specifically, in the case of Hong Kong, as will be discussed in more detail below, more middle-class students than working-class students pass two public examinations – the two important branching points – and eventually get a bachelor’s degree. However, I suggest that attention should also be paid to elucidate how class effects operate for students who fail at one of those branching points or both, so-called ‘loser’ students, so that we could understand why more middle-class students than their working-class counterparts, despite failing at previous stage(s), could still finally get a place in university. The term ‘loser’ could certainly be criticized for being derogative; but, in using it here, I do not have such intention: for the sake of convenience, I use it simply to refer to students who fail any necessary public examination and thus could not move on to the next stage in an education system