Small-Town Test-Takers: The Cost of Mobility

Xie Ailei

Hello everyone. My name is Xie Ailei, from the School of Educational Science at South China Normal University.

My research focuses on social development and educational equity. In recent years I have paid particular attention to rural students’ education and social mobility.

I truly value this chance to share today, because every time I speak in public, I feel I can help convey a small part of the voice of the social group I belong to.

What Is a “Small-Town Test-Taker”?

You must all know the phrase xiaozhen zuotijia — “small-town test-taker.”

Online it refers to students born in villages or small towns who, thanks to their skill at exam-taking, scored well on the college-entrance examination and entered elite universities.

If that is the definition, then I myself am one.

I grew up in rural Anhui. In my senior year I ranked first in liberal-arts at my provincial key high school, and by a lucky accident enrolled in East China Normal University’s English program.

At university I met many brilliant and fascinating professors, but London, Paris, Shakespeare, opera—all of it felt unimaginably far from my original life.

I felt lost, unable to adapt to study or campus life.

My circle was small; I often walked alone through campus at night.

Sometimes friends dragged me to Halloween parties, yet I would slip out halfway through, convinced I did not belong there.

Precisely because of this experience, I began to wonder:

Were other rural students like me facing similar confusion?

What causes these difficulties?

That question gradually led me to make educational equity research my lifelong pursuit.

A Longitudinal Study of “Test-Takers”

In 2013, when I began my first academic post at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I launched a tracking study of about 2,000 urban and rural students.

I wanted to know: within elite universities, what obstacles do rural-origin students encounter? Where do they struggle?

I hesitated to call them “test-takers,” because the term already carried a tone of stigma.

But the label has now spread everywhere online, surrounded by new stereotypes—people say they have “narrow horizons,” “low comprehensive quality,” “never traveled far,” “small mind-set,” “only good at tests.”

Once a journalist asked me,

“Professor Xie, since civil-service and graduate-school exams are so popular now, does that mean these students again have an advantage?”

I replied: Absolutely not.

Please don’t treat small-town test-taker as a neutral description of ability.

Its hidden message is about what they lack, not what they’re good at.

When I asked my interviewees,

“Do you feel you’re better at exams than others? After all, climbing from a village to an elite university is not easy,”

almost all said no:

“The admission line is the same. City students scored the same marks as we did. Why would they be worse at doing questions?”

Later, while writing my book, I reread a million words of interview transcripts.

I found that in their first and second college years, when reflecting on their upbringing, one of the most frequent words they used was “doing questions.”

They had escaped their old lives through exams and problem sets, yet were pained afterward: once the “exam-machine” phase ended, no one told them how to live beyond the goal of passing the test.

Their lives had only one narrow track—the exam track—and that one-dimensional pathway now left them struggling to explore an elite-university world.

“I Can’t Find the Feeling”

This confusion began the moment they entered university.

One student, Xiao Jun, told me:

“In high school every action plan came from the teacher—what to do and when. Suddenly all that vanished. I was left with ‘free time’ and ‘choices’ and had no idea how to taste this freedom.”

Another, Xiao Yi, reflected both as a sophomore and again at graduation:

“In high school it was just study. From 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. every day, always on campus doing questions. Teachers kept saying, ‘Grades are everything. Suffer now and you’ll be happy in college.’

But once in college I found grades were only one side of life; value wasn’t a transcript alone—yet I didn’t know what else to do.”

He recalled walking past grand buildings—the gym, the student center—yet never opening their doors.

“At the time,” he said, “I should have gone in. Maybe those four years would have been different.”

Xiao Yi reminded me of what sociologist Diane Reay once wrote: entering an elite university can feel like a fish out of water.

The culture and meaning of university emerge slowly, and at first, students lack the conceptual tools to grasp them.

When I was a child in the countryside, I rarely went into town.

Once my mother took me there and bought me a 50-cent popsicle—five times the normal price.

I thought it must be delicious, but it tasted bitter, so I threw it away.

Years later my brother brought chocolates home; only then did I realize that popsicle had been chocolate-flavored.

Sociology tells us that taste itself is shaped by early experience.

What is unfamiliar, we reject.

The same goes for culture: rural students’ early “flavors” are different, so when faced with new tastes, they feel anxious and restrained.

Hence many said they “couldn’t find the feeling” in elite universities.

“Self-Underestimation,” Not Inferiority

Though the environment was alien, they still wanted to explore.

Xiao Lei told me that despite occasional material poverty, she longed for new experiences.

Yet a sense of spiritual deprivation hung over her.

In freshman and sophomore years she dared not join activities; her social circle was tiny.

Once a classmate dragged her to a Student Union interview, but seeing the crowd, she left.

“I heard them ask questions about literature, about feelings after reading essays. They spoke so profoundly. I thought, if they asked me, I’d say nothing. I just felt I wasn’t as good.”

People might call that “inferiority,” but I prefer the term self-underestimation.

It isn’t a psychological defect but a socially produced feeling.

Because they lack the cultural skills that elite settings reward, they rate themselves negatively.

Scarcity of resources becomes self-doubt; collective inequality turns into private pain.

Such feelings have measurable consequences.

Compared with city peers, rural students hold fewer class or student-union positions and spend less time in campus organizations or social gatherings.

As one joked to me, “Professor Xie, I guess I can only quietly be the straight-A nerd.”

Are You Part of This City?

By junior year I asked a new question:

“Do you feel you belong to this city?”

A student named Xiao Jie, whose style never changed through years of interviews, told me she cared only about study.

When asked if she felt part of the city, she silently cried:

“I will never become one of them.”

This was typical.

Many said they were “still rural people studying in the city,” or that they “belonged to both yet to neither.”

Xiao Yi said that when he returned to his village, few even remembered his name, yet he still loved that land.

He whispered, “If my parents pass away, the bond will be gone.”

He was losing his old belonging while uncertain of the new one.

He noticed classmates’ lifestyles—phones, brands, sports—felt unreachable.

“They talk football; I can’t join in.”

The invisible wall of consumption and symbols separated him.

“I don’t even know those brands,” he said. “They order take-out; I go to the canteen.”

Thus he couldn’t blend into city life; the university was his only harbor—but one selling only one-way tickets.

It slowly carried him away from the home that was both culturally and geographically fading.

Yet the harbor couldn’t anchor him in the new city either.

At our last interview he said quietly,

“Once I leave campus, I’m just a drifting reed.”

Fighting Hard for an Ordinary Script

Identity change is only half the story.

The other half appears at graduation and employment.

Research shows that compared with urban peers, rural graduates from elite universities now find it harder to secure good jobs.

As a song says: “We fight with all we have, only to trade it for an ordinary script.”

Indeed, these students and their families have fought with all their strength.

That “family system of striving” gives them a heavy sense of duty: if they fail to land a respectable job, they feel they have betrayed their parents’ hopes.

Data show that initial salaries for urban students are 20 percent higher on average.

Urban graduates are likelier to work in state-owned or foreign enterprises, while rural ones cluster in private companies or education-training jobs.

Opportunities for symbolically “better” work are scarcer.

Why? Because rural students prioritize economic security.

One interviewee, Xiao Xiao, wanted to study abroad but couldn’t afford it.

When her father fell ill, she shuttled between university and home.

After endless fatigue she said, “When I finally found a job, I just thought—fine, that’s it.”

Some theories call such youth “lacking ambition” or “living for today,”

but those abstractions miss the raw reality of their lives.

“Soft Credentials” and Missed Preparation

Sociologist Lauren Rivera, in Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, studied U.S. investment banks and law firms.

She found that elite employers favor those with elite diplomas, extracurriculars, and polished style—a recruitment process biased toward higher-class youth.

They value cultural sameness: the ability to mingle at cocktail parties, to chat about skiing or violin.

Likewise, in China’s elite universities a new employment-management culture has emerged.

Students are told to recognize fierce competition, join clubs and contests, and accumulate internships—to “add value” to their diplomas with soft credentials.

They are urged to plan early, to practice “résumé economics.”

Yet my rural interviewees rarely knew this.

They focused narrowly on academics, neglected soft-skill building, and blamed themselves later as “late to wake.”

They depended on structural guidance—study hard, graduate—without strategic planning.

One said that when filling college applications, his family hoped he’d be a teacher or doctor; he found the guidebook full of strange terms—civil engineering, e-commerce—and picked randomly.

At university he disliked his major and never knew how it linked to jobs.

During school many also took part-time work for financial need, unrelated to their careers.

It reminded me of Bourdieu’s line:

“For some, acquiring elite culture is an achievement bought with great cost; for others, it is simply inheritance.”

As one student told me,

“Studying was the simplest thing—you could still find a way on your own.

Society isn’t like that.

There are things you must start learning in college; you can’t make them up later.”

From Cultural Enrichment to Cultural Empowerment

These students are tired of redemption through grades alone.

They long for self-development—to learn hidden cultural rules, discover interests, and gain ways of seeing and acting.

But between their old lives and the new cultural world lies no clear bridge.

As one said,

“From my home you can walk to primary school, but to walk to university—you can’t just walk there.”

So what can we do?

As a homeroom teacher for a public-funded education program—mostly rural students who will become village teachers—I tried two projects:

one called Mentor Plan, another Seniors Tell You.

With faculty support, I took small groups of students and teachers out for meals.

Students prepared questions about study and life; they exchanged WeChat contacts.

It may sound trivial, but it matters.

Many rural students don’t know how—or whether—to “network upward.”

They think teachers only contact them when there’s trouble.

In reality, a brief chat after class can even raise participation grades.

So I want them to learn early the interaction norms of university life.

I also talk one-on-one with each student every semester.

I ask them to connect their current studies to their future teaching work,

to explore the city, visit galleries and concerts.

Sometimes I give them tickets.

I tell them: when you return to rural schools, you will be the eyes of those children.

These small acts, I call cultural enrichment:

(1) early orientation to elite-university culture;

(2) balancing cultural-resource supply between city and countryside—libraries, museums, clubs—so rural kids can form interests.

But beyond enrichment, we need cultural empowerment.

For too long, “rural” has meant backward and poor.

Students’ past experiences are rarely valued in elite spaces.

We must affirm those experiences.

For instance, I used to struggle with English reading-comprehension passages about airports.

I’d never flown, so words like collect tickets or security check baffled me.

Children who’ve flown have ready cultural “schemas”; exam designers forget others live differently.

Cultural enrichment would teach rural children about such city scenes.

Cultural empowerment would go further—integrate rural life into the curriculum itself, so their world becomes legitimate knowledge.

Let dialogues happen in fields and village shops; let their own imagery scaffold learning.

A volunteer teacher once told me she rewrote textbook dialogues to take place in a township convenience store.

That, I think, is empowerment.

Speaking in Our Own Voice

To me, “small-town test-taker” represents a unique social image built by rural youth themselves.

It’s less about ability than about their mentality of survival and exploration.

It also shows a special reflexivity: the moment they question their situation, they are already negotiating and resisting fate.

By senior year my interviewees had grown deeply reflective.

When I asked, “Do you think studying changes destiny?” one asked back, “Do you think so?”

He said,

“I don’t know—but it’s the only road I have.”

He then analyzed the structural roots of his single-track life.

I felt honored to weave these reflections into a collective story of struggle and possible paths forward.

All of them described high-school years of relentless training and competition—standard answers, scores, winners and losers.

Such schooling gave them pain and also planted the seeds of later cultural barriers.

If education ends up only with test scores and ranking,

it will keep producing “small-town test-takers,” “factory test-takers,”

but never students who see richer choices and fuller lives.

Today, too many reports portray rural youth as static, doomed examples.

Some of my students read them and think, “Our fate can’t change.”

But through these stories, can you also hear a desire for change?

Friends often advise me:

“Professor Xie, stop studying disadvantaged groups, or you’ll become one.

In this age of grand narratives, your voice will be ignored.”

I tell them it’s fine.

I am one of them.

I understand their feelings.

If even I do nothing, who else can stand from our position and tell our shared story?

More importantly, through my research and speaking,

I hope what you hear is not self-pity, but the power to change—ourselves and others.

That power nourishes my career and teaches me to build a steadier, brighter self

in an imperfect world.

Thank you.