Academics far more likely to reply to elite university students

Academics in China are significantly more likely to respond to students who are studying at elite universities than to those attending more run-of-the-mill institutions, a new study has found.

Researchers Jingjing Zeng of Shenzhen University and Xiaoran Luo of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law conducted a six-month experiment to establish whether university prestige influences students’ “equality of access to academic resources” during their studies.

They sent 308 emails to faculty members who had recently published papers in relevant fields.

Each academic received the same enquiry from a fictitious student, with some purporting to be from “the top two universities nationwide” and others listing an institution ranked “around 200th”.

The differences were stark. Students from the elite universities received 62 replies (40 per cent), compared with 43 replies (28 per cent) for ordinary-university students.

They also received “significantly higher response rates, faster replies, more detailed feedback, and friendlier responses” and were more likely to receive “substantive answers and reference materials”.

Analysis indicated that students from elite universities had a 69.5 per cent higher email response rate, and were substantially more likely to receive detailed replies, friendly attitudes, substantive answers, reference materials and rapid responses.

The findings, published in the journal Higher Education, reveal “pronounced inequality in how teachers allocate academic resources across university tiers”.

The authors argue that the structural advantages of elite-university students “heighten teachers’ attention to this group”, while students from ordinary universities “face significant barriers to accessing academic resources”.

The research also sheds light on which academics are most likely to prioritise elite-university students. Full professors, the authors found, were more inclined to respond to such students than associate professors or lecturers.

They replied more quickly, more thoroughly, with “substantive answers” and “reference materials” and displayed a “friendlier attitude”.

Location and institutional status also mattered. Faculty in first-tier cities were “more inclined to allocate academic resources to students from elite universities”, a pattern the authors link to competitive pressures and greater volumes of student enquiries.

Meanwhile, academics at double first-class universities showed “a significant positive impact on elite university students” across response rate, detail, attitude and quality.

The paper argues that the roots of these disparities lie in China’s stratified higher education system, in which government policies “systematically channel talent-development opportunities toward key universities”.

This, the authors suggest, creates “differentiated incentives for faculty” and institutionalises a “support-the-best logic”, leaving ordinary-university students structurally disadvantaged.

The authors add that inequality in access to academic resources during study may be “more damaging than later labour-market disparities” because it shapes research skills, academic confidence and human-capital accumulation long before graduates face employers.

They warn that such early-stage disadvantages risk “entrenching and exacerbating long-term social inequality”.

Reforms are “urgently needed”, the paper argues. It calls for more equitable funding, cross-institutional sharing of academic activities, online guidance platforms, changes to faculty evaluation systems that incentivise mentoring and revisions to talent-selection policies that currently “prioritise applicants’ research potential and scholarly achievements rather than university pedigree”.

Without such structural changes, the authors warn, higher education risks “widening the developmental gap between university tiers”.