This book presents a comprehensive account of the educational experiences of community college students in Hong Kong, analyzed through a theoretical lens that intersects sociological theories of inequality, including Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. The student narratives featured in this book reveal the interweaving personal, academic, and professional considerations and challenges affecting their individual choices in the pursuit of higher education. Chapters also reveal why, despite the relative expansion of educational opportunities, the class gap in higher education persists.

Issues such as the high rate of grade retention and the low completion rate of basic education in Macao have drawn a lot of public attention. More at issue is the quality of education in Macao. While blame for academic failure is usually laid on individual students, in this book Yi-Lee Wong and Chi-Fong Chan seek to provide a structural explanation by investigating the operation of the modern education of Macao. Referring extensively to Macao's colonial past, Wong and Chan highlight how colonialism's historical legacy shapes the characteristics of the existing education system in Macao; specifically how it has both generated and sustained a system whereby privately run schools are publicly funded. In such a system, private schools can get government funding without being effectively monitored. Such schools are free to carry out school-specific policies (including policies of grade retention and teacher hiring), teach an exclusive school-specific curriculum, and use unique school-specific standards to assess students. Despite the 1999 handover of Macao from Portugal to China, and regardless of the great efforts made to improve education by Macao's SAR government since then, the situation remains more or less unchanged. The authors argue that Macao's colonial history poses huge challenges to educational reform. To make this case, Wong and Chan analyse thorny issues facing the Macao SAR government, concentrating on schools, teachers and students. In their analysis, they draw on a variety of empirical evidence, such as historical material, secondary documents, statistics (including results from Programme for International Student Assessment on OECD countries), and updated empirical findings from surveys; as well as ethnographic studies on contemporary Macao. In the concluding chapter, Wong and Chan use the case of Macao to urge policy makers to rethink the promised societal benefits of the privatization of education suggested in the dominant neo-liberal discourse.

This book is the second volume of a qualitative study of social mobility over three generations in post-war Hong Kong. The family histories and work-life histories of eighty-nine respondents who were middle-aged, middle-class parents -- teachers, managers and their spouses -- were collected between 1996 and 1997. This book examines the processes of social mobility in order to elucidate how social mobility is generated at the micro level and it investigates the consequences of social mobility to show how the system of social stratification can be reproduced or changed over generations.

This book is the first volume of a qualitative study of social mobility over three generations in post-war Hong Kong. The family histories and work-life histories of eighty-nine respondents who were middle-aged middle-class parents -- teachers, managers, and their spouses -- were collected between 1996 and 1997. This book examines the processes of social mobility in order to elucidate how social mobility is generated at the micro level and it investigates the consequences of social mobility with a view to illuminating how the system of social stratification could be reproduced or changed over generations.

There are two major aims for this book: first, to make a contribution to the academic debates; and second, to urge frontline INGO practitioners to reflect critically on their practices. Referring to the practices of CEP in reforming the system of higher education in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, this book seeks to engage in two major debates: one, over the role of INGO in social development; and two, over the relationship between INGO and Imperialism. In the discussion, the author highlighted the elements that are usually overlooked in the existing literature, namely, contradiction and contingency. Data is in the form of my first-hand experience of working as a university lecturer teaching in several universities in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and as a CEP visiting fellow actively involved in its activities. The data poses challenges to the development logic of INGO and the logic of Imperialism; this provides an interesting basis for a provocative discussion. Since data also offers an interesting evaluation of CEP, they reveal not only difficulties facing CEP in bringing changes to the former-Soviet countries but also common problems of the system of higher education in this region.

This book presents a comprehensive account of the educational experiences of community college students in Hong Kong, analyzed through a theoretical lens that intersects sociological theories of inequality, including Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. The student narratives featured in this book reveal the interweaving personal, academic, and professional considerations and challenges affecting their individual choices in the pursuit of higher education. Chapters also reveal why, despite the relative expansion of educational opportunities, the class gap in higher education persists.