Empirical Study on Poor-Rich Disparities Based on College Campus Consumption Data

Empirical Study on Poor-Rich Disparities Based on College Campus Consumption Data

With the Chinese society developing rapidly, the poor-rich disparities between different social stratum is becoming more obvious, even in college students. How to understand the poor or rich situation in Chinese college is an important topic worthy of investigation, especially with the help of big data collected by campus information system. This paper analyzes the living situation of college students, based on about 5,000 undergraduates’ three years of full cycle consumption records in one university of China, which includes the consumption in campus canteen, shops, water, and electricity, etc. The research not only demonstrates the unbalance of students’ consumption levels, by comparing the temporal consumption patterns using statistical analysis, but also further discusses the effect of Government Student Grant in adjusting the unbalance, which is verified to be effective for helping the students in worse economic status in order to improve the social equality and provide more opportunities for those students to obtain college educations. Based on the statistical analysis, it is found that there is certain poor-rich disparities in students’ campus living standards, and the aid is given to poor students to improve their living condition effectively. The research provides fundamental understandings on poor-rich disparities of college which is useful for college education.