Family Capital and Social Class Solidification: The Involvement of Shadow Education

Education —one of the institutions of social stratification, also appears differentiation in the process of social stratification. In recent years, extracurricular tutoring has grown rapidly in China, and this kind of supplementary learning aimed at improving students' academic performance is known as "shadow education". In this regard, parents with different family capital have made different levels of investment for their children, in order to enable students to obtain higher grades, further access to better educational opportunities, and have a greater advantage in the increasingly competitive job market. This paper will take the role of shadow education in social stratification as the core, analyze it from the aspects of family capital, participation motivation, access to opportunities, and the connection between education and occupation, etc., to discuss that shadow education has become an important way to maintain the gap between the rich and the poor, which further expand the phenomenon of social inequality.