**: Intellectuals l
Written by丨Cheng Chen, Shen Yang
When it comes to dating platforms, what do you think of?
Is it Lily.com, Zhenai.com, Century Jiayuan, or Qingteng Love, Mo Shanghua Blossom, Jiaotong University Matchmaker, and Ergou? The former is a well-known marriage and love platform that can be seen in mainstream blind date programs, while the latter has a high degree of education as the highlight, and has sprung up in the domestic marriage and love market in recent years.
From 2021 to 2022, we analyzed the self-presentation of users of an educational elite dating platform in their recruitment ads, and interviewed the founder and core employees of the platform, and obtained first-hand information about the platform's vision and operating mechanism.
The platform stipulates that only applicants who are studying or graduating from 985 universities in China or the top 100 overseas universities in QS can post friend recruitment advertisements on their WeChat***, and the vast majority of users who use its WeChat mini program for blind dates are at least graduates of famous foreign universities. As of the time of the interview, the platform has accumulated more than 500,000 highly educated single users, and among the users who use its dating services, 35% start a relationship within three months, and 15% get married within one to two years, which is much higher than the marriage rate of traditional platform users 68% (Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Rights Protection Commission, 2021). The platform's unique style of dating messages and its impressive performance in matchmaking success rates make us wonder: what makes it successful?
This year, our research on the sociological underpinnings behind this elite dating platform was published in Chinese Sociological Review, and here are our key findings.
The success of the "elite" dating platform
When the founder of the platform who graduated from a prestigious university tried to find a life partner through a traditional dating platform, he encountered the problem of high screening time cost and inability to determine the authenticity because of the mixed user profile. With the idea of solving the marriage and love problems for their own circle, they founded this elite dating platform with university prestige as the core screening mechanism, and its positioning is to help well-educated people find serious intimacy.
In their view, education is the "right match" in the modern sense. *Information asymmetry in marriage and dating, similar education levels can help users efficiently screen out people with similar characteristics such as three views, taste and IQ, and can also quickly enhance trust between strangers.
In order to meet the needs of educational elites, the platform has formulated three major strategies based on WeChat functions:
(1) Through *** posting, improve the degree of personal marriage and love advertising for highly educated users, focusing on detail and truthfulness;The logic of university prestige at its core permeates the algorithms and management of the platform. In the mini program that provides marriage and dating services, users who have completed the academic certification will get more opportunities and the opportunity to send dating invitations; Alumni who graduated from the same school have a higher weight for recommendations; When providing one-to-one marriage and love services, the matchmaker on the platform will try to avoid connecting users with too large educational gaps.2) Based on the acquaintances of highly educated users in the WeChat circle of friends, consolidate the image of the platform serving the education elite;
3) Through WeChat applets, create a convenient dating network.
The platform's work team has also graduated from prestigious universities, they recognize the platform's values, and some employees have even found their other half through the platform.
How can the educational elite continue its dominant position through marriage and love?
Compared with the simple listing of common elements such as education, work, family situation, and whether there is a house or not on other platforms when publishing marriage and love information, the length of the elite marriage and love platform we surveyed is much longer (most of each article is 2000-3500 words). These platform-guided dating materials are designed to show a real, unique, and memorable poster, carrying important information about the self-presentation of educational elites. To this end, our research collected dating profiles published on the platform's WeChat*** and analyzed them on a thematic basis. Specific topics are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Topics found by analyzing the marriage and love information posted by users of an elite dating platform.
Through repeated reading, coding, discussion, and revision, cultural capital gradually emerges from these texts, and it plays an important role in the process of choosing a mate for the educational elite.
We found that most of the educational elites who posted were only children from urban middle-class families, and both parents had decent and secure jobs, so much so that the description "simple and warm family of three" appeared very frequently. Their family parenting philosophy is often described as strict, caring, supportive, open-minded, and respectful, consistent with the authoritative parenting style defined by Baumrind (1966). In this parenting style, parents limit their children's misbehavior and expect a lot from them, but are also willing to listen to their children's ideas, respect their choices, and encourage them when they encounter difficulties. Some platform users also highlight that they have a rich collection of books at home, and that their parents have graduated from prestigious universities, or that their parents teach at universities, showing that cultural capital has been passed down from generation to generation.
At the same time, compared with other platforms, users of this elite dating platform often describe their academic and extracurricular life in detail during their school days, and pay more attention to highlighting their famous school labels. They expressed their sense of belonging to a prestigious school by showing their ** taken on campus or wearing a degree gown, and also demonstrated the advantages of the platform and resources brought by studying in a prestigious school by recalling rich internships and overseas exchange experiences.
According to Bourdieu (1986), cultural capital manifests itself in three forms: the embodied state (e.g., profound knowledge, critical thinking ability, refined taste and lifestyle), the objectified state (e.g., books, musical instruments, and the consumption of works of art), and the institutionalized state. Usually refers to degrees and certificates awarded to individuals by educational institutions). Elites are distinguished from other groups of people by virtue of their cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984).
The educational elite's emphasis on relatively wealthy families and the background of prestigious schools in their dating materials is the embodiment of the reproduction of cultural capital. In addition, we also found that the educational elite pays attention to the representation of cultural capital when looking for objects.
On the one hand, they like to show off their time-consuming, expensive hobbies. For example, they like to show a variety of travel experiences and a unique and poetic attitude to life during the journey. For example, gym workouts, running, and skiing are some of the most frequently cited hobbies, which either require long-term systematic training to demonstrate a positive and disciplined lifestyle, or are very expensive and require professional equipment to prove the poster's cultural and financial strength.
On the other hand, users of the elite dating platforms we surveyed strongly expressed their preference for "soul mates". A 32-year-old male user explicitly wrote: "If you were my soulmate, I would be more fully engaged. A 28-year-old female user expressed the hope that her partner would be the same person who "plays straight" like herself. Another 32-year-old male user wants his partner and himself to have a self-disciplined lifestyle.
The emphasis on like-mindedness and healthy and consistent lifestyles reflects their preference for partners with high cultural capital similar to their own, and their pursuit of high-quality intimacy.
In terms of the actual mate selection behavior of the education elites who posted the blind date stickers, we found that the achievement of a high matching rate on the elite marriage and love platforms we surveyed depended on four common factors: similar intergenerational relationships, similar academic and work experiences, common hobbies, and similar personalities. Behind these characteristics is the high cultural capital associated with elite education.
Current research on educational elites focuses on how privileged parents help their children get into elite universities, and how elite universities train students to become educational elites. However, these studies do not answer the question of how the educational elite maintains their elite status after graduation. And our research fills this gap.
By focusing on one of the largest elite marriage platforms in China with a high degree of education, our research reveals how educational elites can form a closed loop of "intra-clan marriage" by emphasizing cultural capital, thereby consolidating class advantage. In addition, we reveal the role that the platform plays in this. These contribute to understanding how cultural capital plays a role in the Chinese language context, and to identify mechanisms that reinforce cultural inequalities beyond the family and higher education.
Inheritance of cultural capital based on academic qualifications and family background
It conveys another kind of generational inequality
The existence of elite dating platforms can exacerbate social inequalities within and across generations. In terms of intragenerational inequalities, the emphasis on elite universities in the dating process reflects the differentiation of higher education. This divergence has led to the concentration of resources in a small number of elite universities. Returns to higher education also vary from university to university, reflecting income inequality between the educational elite and other groups. Although these elites emphasize their cultural capital in their profiles, their high income can be seen from the statistics published by the aforementioned platforms: as of April 2022, there are 453% of male users and 2409% of female users have an annual income of more than 500,000 yuan. Considering the platform's high success rate of matchmaking, although these elites emphasize cultural capital when recruiting friends, once the match is successful, it is likely to exacerbate the economic inequality between the non-educational elite.
In terms of intergenerational inequalities, elite education can be seen as a filter for marriage, and it may also transfer cultural capital and replicate social inequalities across three generations. The self-presented data of the blind dates shows that most people come from middle-class families, and their successful marriage means a combination of two dominant families. In addition, elite-educated couples are likely to pass on their dominant position by raising children, which further entrenches intergenerational inequalities. Educational inequalities exacerbated by intergenerational transmission are detrimental to social mobility. Therefore, in terms of policy design, it may be possible to redistribute financial subsidies to higher education institutions, so as to make higher education institutions more balanced and alleviate the phenomenon of higher education stratification, so as to alleviate intra-generational and inter-generational educational inequality.
Note: Cheng Chen is a graduate student at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Yang Shen is an associate professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Related**Original: tang, m, shen, y., cheng, c. (2024). intra-clan marriage in modern times: the role of elite education in assortative mating, chinese sociological review, online first.
References omitted.