In China, government at all levels relies on the specially selected graduates (SSG) scheme to recruit elite university students as future political leaders. This article examines the mechanism of the SSG scheme and the relationship between elite university education and political selection in China. We show that elite education is increasingly stratified, such that graduates from top elite universities have significant selection advantages in the SSG competition and are more likely to be offered incentives and preferences. We argue that taking elite university education as a hard eligibility criterion reinforces the homophily effects in selection of future political elites and strengthens the political influence of top elite universities on China's politics. Further, because poor and lower-class students have little chance of entering elite universities, the SSG does not provide an effective route of upward mobility for non-elite classes. Merit-based political recruitment as a channel of upward mobility for non-elite classes is largely an illusion.

This article explores the conflict between US public and private higher educational institutions by tracing the long struggle for a public university in Boston between 1890 and 1980. This history reveals how the competitive relationship between public and private institutions was central to the formation of each sector, while also complicating a clear dichotomy between the two. Educational innovations such as state scholarships, teacher-training initiatives, university extension courses, and junior colleges are also recast in this story as strategies to limit, rather than expand, the public sector. Finally, this history should prompt a reinterpretation of the current neoliberal moment. Rather than view contemporary budget cuts and public-private partnerships as novel historical departures of the late twentieth century, they appear in this Massachusetts story as a return to a political landscape long hostile to public higher education.