Will Brehm  1:39
Core Xu, welcome to Fresh Ed.

Core Xu  1:41
Hi, Will. Thanks for having me.

Will Brehm  1:43
So congratulations on your new book. At the heart of the book, there’s this idea that we don’t just inherit wealth and inherit status, which is a common way of understanding what inheritance means, but you talk about it in terms of inheriting time. And I want to just, you know, before we jump into this research, I want you to just unpack this intuition for us. What does it mean to say that time is something that gets passed down across generations?

Core Xu  2:09
Indeed, when we say inheritance, we usually think of property or money. And I’m asking us today to recognize a more fundamental transfer, which is unearned labor time. The bridge here is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that capital is accumulated labor and that labor takes time to build up. So if a family passes down economic capital, social connections and cultural know-how, they are effectively passing down the benefits of time already spent by previous generations. Time that you don’t have to spend again, right?

So this happens in two ways. Quantitatively speaking, some people start life with full tank. They have financial buffers, insider knowledge and networks that save them years and years of trial and error, right? And qualitatively speaking, this buffer becomes a secure relation to the future, a secure relation with time, a sense that time will not punish you for experimenting or pausing or changing directions.

So a common pushback usually when I talk about this idea is that, right, isn’t this just another word for class? So my answer is, well, time is how class becomes lived, felt and decision-shaping. Time is the mechanism that turns resources into trajectories and it does so in ways that conventional measures like income, occupation or even cultural capital often miss until it’s too late.

Will Brehm  3:32
And some of these other measures of class like income and wealth, like how is time measured? Is it minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, generations? Like how are you conceiving time here?

Core Xu  3:42
So you see that’s a great question because there are so many different ways to conceive of time. What you have just said is a very quantitative way, you know, of measuring a conceiving time, which is, you know, clock time. Yeah, we think about minutes, hours, decades, etc, etc. But we also have to understand that there is also more subjective, qualitative ways of conceiving of time, right? So Bourdieu himself talks about time in practice. So basically, how do we understand time, right? We understand time because, you know, by judging the sort of correlation or the match, the extent of match between what our subjective expectations are and the objective probabilities.

So let me give you an example, right? You want to go to the airport to pick up someone and you budget yourself like an hour, right? And yet in the middle of your drive to the airport, you see some traffic jam, right? And you spend about two minutes waiting and yet you feel it’s like half an hour. Your subjective expectation is that you want to get there as quickly as possible. And yet the objective conditions and probability is such that it makes you feel it’s really, really long. So there’s this clash there.

So how do we measure time? We cannot just measure time quantitatively. We also have to think about the qualitative, the subjective aspect of time. And that is why in the book I draw on these economic sociologists, Marcin Serafin’s two extremely useful distinctions of time, which is called time of action and time in action. So when we think about time of action, it’s basically about the broader temporal structures that are shaping, regulating, imposed on us often, right? So think about the academic calendar, the religious calendar, you know, the Christmas, or when to start an academic semester, when to have final exams, etc. These are imposed on us and we feel as if we have to follow them. And if we don’t, there are consequences.

Similarly, in our life course, we have, you know, temporal structures or expectations imposed on us. By 25, you should have done a university degree and you should have a few years of experiences and then you should have got married, etc., etc. You know, there are all of these goalposts that we are supposed to fulfill. So this is the time of action. But in time in action, it’s basically aligned with Bourdieu’s understanding of, you know, time being produced in practice. So that’s how we live our time, how we feel that we’re living, basically, yeah.

Will Brehm  6:12
And in your book, you end up talking about two sort of different ways that time is sort of experienced. There’s that banked time, as you call it, and then also borrowed time. So how, you know, explain these terms to us. And if you could, you know, like, how does that connect to schooling itself? Like, what would be an example connected to education more broadly?

Core Xu  6:32
I would like to, first of all, unpack banked time versus borrowed time, right? So if someone has ever had a month where one missed paycheck would trigger a chain reaction, right? Rent stress, family stress, health stress, that’s borrowed time logic, right? So in my interviews, students living on borrowed time describe everyday life, every decision that they have to make about education or about life as constant triage, right? Which obligation is most urgent? Which can be postponed without collapse? Which choice avoids shame or blame?

In practice, banked time, you know, students who live on banked time can do things that look risky or even daring, right? But are actually strategic, like taking a gap year, like switch majors midway in their university studies, like do an unpaid internship, like withdrawing from a program that isn’t working. So, or waiting even for months, you know, for a better job match instead of accepting the very first job offer that they can get. So these moves require money, yes. But also the confidence that time won’t collapse, that your life will not just fall apart if you don’t monetize your time immediately, yeah?

And so students who live on borrowed time, however, they make decisions under a very different temporal logic or physics, right? So they feel pressed for speed because their education is built on sacrifice. Parent overtime work, siblings drop schooling, family debt, moral and monetary debts. I’m talking about both of them. So they prioritize immediate income, certainty, and not falling behind, even when that choice damages long-term outcomes. And often they are not even aware of that damage because they are so busy surviving. So that is why in my research, debt paying can produce what looks like self-sabotage, you know, from outsiders’ perspectives, or often when my participants look back like even, you know, 10 or 20 years later, but is better understood as survival rationality under time scarcity.

Will Brehm  8:29
And so in a lot of your book, you sort of discuss the Gaokao as a way of trying to unpack some of what time inheritance sort of, how it plays out, how it’s socially constructed. For listeners who don’t know about the Gaokao, can you explain what it is first? And then, you know, how you start thinking about it in terms of time inheritance?

Core Xu  8:48
Gaokao is China’s national college entrance exam. In the UK, the equivalent is probably A-levels. In the US, it’s probably SAT. And it is a very competitive entrance exam. I mean, we all know that university entrance exams are competitive, but in China, it is especially competitive. And just to give you some scale, right, in 2024, the Ministry of Education in China reported about 13.5 million Gaokao registrants. So we are thinking about how much, so in the UK, the population size is 60 million. So 13.5 is nearly like one fourth of the UK’s population.

Will Brehm  9:25
Bigger than the whole Australian population.

Core Xu  9:27
Bigger than the whole Australian population. So first of all, we’re talking about the sheer number of Gaokao sitters. It’s really, really big. But also I wanted to talk about the competitiveness and the unfairness of Gaokao. So even after China’s higher education expansion, structural gaps in access have been enormous. For example, in Hongbin Li, so he’s a researcher based in Stanford. He and his team, they published a very well cited study in the China Quarterly in 2015, where they use cohort data in China to estimate that only 7% of rural youth from poor counties could access any college compared to about 48% of urban youth.

For elite universities like Project 211 and Project 985, so here in this study, they just focus on Project 211 universities. So this is like a group of universities that are getting a lot of resources from the government. In the UK, maybe the equivalent is the Russell group. In Australia, it’s probably the top eight institutions. So these universities, the gap of access is even more staggering. So about 0.6% of these rural and poor youth can access them versus 7% for the urban youth.

At the very top, if we’re talking about Peking and Tsinghua University, these are the Oxbridge equivalent in China. It was estimated in this study that about 0.003% of rural youth from poor counties versus 0.13% of urban youth can access these two elite universities. So let me translate it into plain language. It means among 100,000 rural youth, only three can get into these top two universities. And if you are from an urban background, among every 10,000 of you, 13 can get into these two elite universities. So you can see the staggering inequality.

And another piece of evidence that I just recently got from a book called The Highest Exam, you know, the Fudan University is China’s third most elite university in Shanghai. And it’s located in Shanghai, so it has a favorable admission policies towards students from Shanghai. And the entire population of Shanghai accounts for about 2% of China’s population. But if you look at Fudan University student population, 51% of its students are from Shanghai. So there’s a really clear urban-rural divide going on.

Will Brehm  11:42
And usually we sort of talk about that in terms of like, you know, there’s kind of this deficit discourse that the, you know, the rural populations are so, you know, deprived and need to escape into the urban center to have a good life. And it’s really kind of pejorative as if nothing is good happening in the rural spaces. That’s like the typical narrative, right? That you escape the rural poverty into the urban sort of opportunities. How do you see it with notions of time and time inheritance?

Core Xu  12:06
Yeah, so I am myself from a rural background. And in my book, I actually dedicate my book to my aunt. And my aunt is a rural woman who has never been to school for even one day in her life. And yet she is one of the most resilient, the smartest people that I have ever met in my life. So I dedicate this book to my aunt because she embodies a form of structural deprivation that’s easy to sentimentalize and incredibly hard to name. A rural woman whose education was not merely missed, but systematically displaced by family survival and gendered expectations.

So in families like mine, girl schooling is often treated as negotiable time. Time that can be allocated to child care, you know, taking care of younger siblings usually, farm work, care for elders, or simply making the household run, you know, doing all these household chores when parents are busy. So that reallocation is presented as love, as duty, as being sensible. In Chinese, it’s 懂事, meaning that you understand how things go and you will not ask for too much more than you deserve or than you are expected to. But it is also a lifelong transfer of life chances.

So growing up around that, you absorb two things very early. The first is you learn that talent is not the main scarcity. In fact, my aunt is extremely smart and resourceful, but time is. So not clock time, we talk about clock time, but usable time. Time that is protected, resourced, and socially recognized as yours.

And second, you learn that the moral language around sacrifice is powerful. People don’t experience inequality only as lack, or lacking money, lacking time, but they experience it as debt, as indebtedness, as gratitude. So that is the seed of what I later conceptualize in the book as a debt-paying mentality. The feeling that your time is never fully your own because other people’s sacrifice are so, so embedded and so sitting inside your trajectory that you have to pay back in the future in monetary terms, but also in social and moral terms.

So the dedication in my book isn’t just a sentimental preface. It is the analytic origin. The book is an attempt to explain why some people move through education with a sense of ease and entitlement, and others move through it with urgency, guilt, and a constant fear of wasting time because for them, wasting time is not a lifestyle choice. It is a moral and economic threat.

Will Brehm  14:30
How do you think you experienced time going through your education?

Core Xu  14:34
For me, I constantly felt as if I did not deserve this time because my parents, they had to work really long hours, but not just long hours, they had to do all kinds of work. You know, my father lost his job when I was about seven or eight years old, and my mom was sick, you know, and then my father had to do all kinds of job, you know, and I remember when I was a primary school child, about maybe in year three or year four, I followed one very sunny and hot summer afternoon, I followed my mom to our township to sell oranges. And because we did not have a set store, right, we basically tried to put our oranges in front, you know, just on the street and often in front of other people’s shops. And so we were constantly driven away, you know, in front of us, go away, go away. So in one afternoon, we were driven away for like five or six times. I was just a primary school child, but I felt this immense sense of shame. So it still stayed with me.
So for me, you know, I had this incredible urge to try to make something out of myself, to be able to, you know, fend for myself, but also for my family. So I felt that, you know, all these sacrifices, all this shame, all these hardships that my family experienced, I had to pay it back. Yeah, so I was often very driven, but also had this incredible sense of insecurity that if I don’t work hard now, this minute, this moment, I’m going to not be able to pay back all of that sacrifices.

Will Brehm  15:59
How did the gaokao contribute to that feeling or those feelings?

Core Xu  16:03
You know, when I got into Xinyi High School in the county seat, which is like a key school in China, which means that, you know, it’s a good school, basically. I remember, I did very poorly in my first year of my senior high school, which means, you know, I was 16 years old, probably. And at that point, I think I was scored 40 something out of 100. And my physics teacher told us, and that was very striking to us, she said, you are going to spend these three years in Xinyi High School as if you were a prisoner, because gaokao is your only way out. And you have to dedicate every single moment of your life to this. And that was effectively how I lived my life there.

So gaokao was extremely competitive, but it was also for a rural child, for a rural girl, it was also something that was such a burden that was imposed on us. And so when I, you know, and eventually, I actually did quite well during senior high school, but in the gaokao, I did not do so well in my Chinese language exam, my Chinese language paper, which was a paper that I expected to score very, very highly. And in the end, I found out that it was because my composition was not good. And at that point, I started to blame myself, saying that, you know, I haven’t read enough. But later on, when I look back, I realized that how could I have read enough? I did not even have money to buy any book. So yeah, so I think, you know, like this experience of gaokao, of blaming myself, of dedicating every moment of my life to it, you know, it became a really important source of, you know, reconciliation and recognition later on, when I was doing this piece of research to say to students like myself, and you know, to others who keep blaming themselves for being not smart, for being not having read enough, or things like that, to say it’s often not your problem. It’s often structural.

Will Brehm  17:56
That’s right. And it’s like you getting into the heart of sociology, right, that debate between structure and agency. And it seems like what you’re really talking about here is how time structures the world in certain ways that then kind of limit agency or sort of almost are deterministic and to who gets to move in certain ways and who do not.

Core Xu  18:14
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So in the book, right, I talk about, you know, I draw on Mike Savage’s reading of Thomas Piketty’s, his very famous book Capital. And in this reading by Savage, he pointed out the six to one ratio about structure versus agency. So in the book, I use this six to one ratio to resist two unhelpful stories. The first one is the heroic meritocracy story, which basically says agency fixes everything. And the fatalist story, which means structure, it means everything and you can’t do anything about it.

So my data show that structure is indeed heavy. Inherited time conditions like mine, like my participants who are from rural and deprived backgrounds, as well from urban working class backgrounds, for them, the inherent time conditions, what options you can realistically take and how costly mistakes will be. But it’s not a closed system. So a minority of disadvantaged inheritors do flip the coin. They do flip the script. So often by activating what I call in the book, time wealth accelerators across different levels.

So, you know, in my time inheritance framework, I have family level, national level and international level analysis levels. And so this time wealth accelerators across different levels. They are mechanisms that can compress time, expand options and change the conversion rate of my participants’ efforts or my own efforts. For instance, English proficiency is a clear example in my research. It can grant access to globally recognized credentials because if you can speak English well and write in English, you can get a degree, for instance, from the UK, the USA, Australia. So these are often globally recognized credentials and you develop networks that are global as well. So they can partially compensate for the familial level and national level time debt that my participants have.

And the key point here is that these exceptions, however, are not proof that the structure doesn’t matter, but they are evidence that agency is conditional. So it becomes effective when a person can plug into a supportive temporal structure, mentors, funding opportunities, institutional protection and sometimes sheer luck. So importantly, these aren’t just motivational sort of, you know, sort of gadgets. Yeah. So they are unevenly distributed opportunities. And one reason the one in seven matters is that it helps us ask a policy question. What would it take to make that fraction bigger?

Will Brehm  20:29
And what would it take? How would you do that?

Core Xu  20:32
Yeah. How would you do that? So, you know, from the perspective of time inheritance, we see that, you know, many well-meaning equity policies quietly assume that everyone can take up support the same way. Right. Extra workshops, extra forms, extra office hours, extra proof, whatever. Right. But for students on borrowed time, these are not support. These are a time tax. They can actually deepen inequality by selecting for students who already have slack. The assumption that time is neutral is wrong. So my single message for policymakers will be treat time as a distributed resource and a distributed burden. Any policy that adds requirements, extra classes, extra applications, extra proof of need, extra compliance will disproportionately tax those already on borrowed time. So that can deepen inequality even when intentions are good. Yeah.

So equity design, in my view, should begin with temporal realism. Who has slack? Who is working, caring, commuting, translating, dealing with visa, bureaucracy or carrying family debt? So then build supports that reduce time tax rather than increase it. Flexible scheduling, paid opportunities instead of unpaid experience, longer and fairer eligibility windows, especially for those affected by care, by labor, you know, child labor, migration, debt or disabilities, etc. And institutional practices that don’t treat the standard timeline, the linear standard timeline as the moral timeline. So to put it in a single line, fairness isn’t only about equal access to education. It’s about equal access to usable time.

Will Brehm  22:05
What about the idea of this might seem completely radical, but what do you think if the Gaokao didn’t exist, what would that do?

Core Xu  22:12
Actually, in China, there have been a lot of talks, right, discussions about the unfairness of Gaokao. And there have been some small scale experiments like, you know, some of these elite universities like Peking Tsinghua University in Beijing and even Fudan, I think. They have some schemes which is called something like independent admission scheme or something like that. I don’t know the exact English translation. So basically, it sort of mimics the format that U.S. universities would take, right? So you would invite a student to come and have an interview or they may write these essays, right? And plus the interview.

Will Brehm  22:44
Yeah, which doesn’t sort of get rid of the inequality that there’s still all sorts of unequal distribution of who gets into U.S. universities as well, even though there’s no Gaokao necessarily.

Core Xu  22:54
Absolutely. And in fact, like this is exactly what happened, you know, like a lot of people in China are very upset about this because it sort of creates a further avenue for corruption. It’s like it’s a new distribution of inequality. It’s distributing inequality using a different mechanism.

Will Brehm  23:08
Exactly. So your question is extremely important. Yeah. What if we don’t have Gaokao? I mean, it seems so far that Gaokao is still a very trustworthy, you know, way of selecting students. But, you know, there are things that we can do to make it fairer in a sense.

Core Xu  23:24
Yeah. Is it Michael Sandel who wrote a book on meritocracy a couple of years ago? And one of his ideas is you lean into that issue of luck. Like you just basically say for university admissions, for instance, like whoever gets over the threshold for getting in, then they just select randomly among that pool for the total number of spots they have. So then it like everyone has like it’s just pure luck, basically. After a certain level of merit, then it’s just pure luck.

Will Brehm  23:47
But this reminds me of some funders in the UK, you know, in the UK, the funding success rates are very low. So some funders, they start to have this kind of mechanism. So for some proposals, if they hit a certain threshold, then they put in a pool and then it’s just random lottery.

Core Xu  24:02
It’s so interesting how that is so different from what I personally sort of have experienced. It doesn’t sit well with me. But at the same time, when I think about it intellectually, I’m like, I think that is actually a pretty good way of doing it, even though I, you know, I could feel in my gut that it is so different than what I’m used to. Because we’re all inculcated from the moment we are born, right? And that is why in my book, I and in my personal experience, for instance, I studied at Cambridge. You know, a lot of people, they really think that, you know, I’m here at Cambridge or I’m doing these great things because I’m smart and hardworking, which they are. But, you know, there are also so many like structural advantages that they have had that they just don’t acknowledge.

Will Brehm  24:44
It’s such a great study. And so I want to end by perhaps asking a rather large question, because in the book, you know, you obviously use a lot of Pierre Bourdieu, but you kind of say you want to go beyond him and go beyond habitus and cultural capital. And I actually I really appreciate that because so much of education research uses his work, but often you rarely see the sort of pushing the ideas beyond. So how have you tried to push beyond his ideas with your notion of time inheritance?

Core Xu  25:11
Yeah, so I want to, first of all, acknowledge my intellectual debt to Pierre Bourdieu because he has been extremely inspiring. And this important grammar, you know, field, capital, habitus, you know, these are really, really important concepts that are inspiring. When I say I want to move beyond him, I’m not discarding him. I’m actually paying a lot of, you know, indebtedness to him and tribute to him. However, I argue in the book that I’m extending him in a way that clarifies mechanisms he implied, but did not fully articulate or systematize.

So Bourdieu gives us, like I said, this powerful grammar, economic, social and cultural capital, habitus field and reproduction in general. So what I do in the time inheritance framework is to highlight time as a constant force, a kind of common denominator across those three foundational capital types, right? Economic, social and cultural capital. In other words, capital is not only what you have, it is also accumulated time and time saving capacity. Time already spent on your behalf and time you therefore don’t have to spend again, you know, for in the cases of where people inherit all forms of capital.

So a second move is methodological and theoretical. So Bourdieu does emphasize the qualitative, the subjective dimension of time, time in practice, like I shared earlier on in this show. So in my framework, I keep that, but I also draw on Marcin Serafin’s idea of time of action to make room for more objective, in quotation marks, temporal classifications like deadlines, eligibility windows, institutional timetables, visa regimes, age windows, etc. To study how those classifications shape people’s subjective reckoning of time. So that combination acts as explanatory power in my view. It allows us to see how external temporal regimes get translated into internal feelings, urgency, anxiety, calmness, entitlement, ease, and how those feelings can then become decision-making logics.

So, and the third point is that in expanding on habitus, the framework of time inheritance accentuates how habitus itself is time-shaped, you know. So this is where concepts like debt-paying mentality and entitled dispositions matter, because they name two contrasting temporal orientations. One where time is experienced as, you know, owed, you know, indebted, where every year must be justified because it carries intergenerational sacrifice, and the other one where time is experienced as available, as always there, as plenty. So where experimentation feels legitimate because loss is buffered, and that isn’t habitus in the abstract, it is habitus under different temporal conditions.

And finally, time inheritance forces a multi-scalar integration that is often handled in a piecemeal way. And Bourdieu himself, he did not, you know, offer like an international, for instance, level of analysis. So for me, I feel it’s very important to say that, right, familial class processes, national institutional regimes, and international and post-colonial hierarchies, they work together. And time becomes this connective tissue that lets these layers speak to one another within a single framework. And it also helps us to explain the unexpected distinctions that sometimes appear in the data.
So for instance, through multiple conditions, and this participant’s own time reckoning, some people managed to convert constrained circumstances into surprising trajectories. Like I have this participant called Jiao, who, you know, is from a very poor rural background, and his family is always struggling to make ends meet. And yet, you know, he did very well in Gaokao, but he did not enter Peking or Tsinghua University, which he could have entered, but he chose to enter a second-tier university because he felt he could not afford the one-year military training. Because that was the kind of condition, you know, time scarcity that he was operating within. So it turns out that he ended up wasting a lot of time looking for a job, etc, etc. But because of his English language proficiency, he was able to capitalize on the international level time privilege that his UK institution was able to accord, you know, him. And also this way, this multiscalar analysis allows us to understand, you know, capital tells you what people have, or time inheritance tells you what people can do with what they have, when and at what risk. And with what psychological and physiological burden.

Will Brehm  29:28
Core Xu, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new book. It’s so theoretically rich, and so empirically grounded. And so it’s a really great book, and I would highly recommend it to listeners, because I really do think you do push the boundaries of Bourdieu in really productive ways. So congratulations on the work.

Core Xu  29:46
Thank you, Will.

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