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Abstract
This thesis traces how vocationalism—an orientation that prioritizes employability and practical training in higher education—emerged alongside the growing enthusiasm for STEM fields in China. Existing research on educational choice and aspiration typically falls into two strands. One emphasizes structural factors such as state policy and labor-market shifts, showing how higher education increasingly becomes a transitional tool for labor-market entry. Yet these accounts cannot explain why vocationalism becomes specifically related to STEM fields, nor how individuals come to prefer particular majors. A second line of work examines how individuals’ demographic positions and occupational values shape educational choices, but often rests on implicit assumptions of stable wage premiums and constant labor market demand, treating “desirable” majors as fixed objects. While variable-centered approaches illuminate individual heterogeneity, they do not explain large-scale shifts in major preference. To bridge this gap, this thesis employs a mixed-method research design. First, computational text analysis of 3,000 Zhihu posts (2014–2025), using word embeddings, semantic projection, and dynamic topic modeling, reveals a pronounced discursive shift in public evaluations of university majors. STEM fields increasingly come to be framed as rational, future-oriented, and investment-like choices compared to other fields. However, analysis of national and provincial admissions quota data from 1998 to 2023 shows that substantial reallocations toward STEM occurred almost exclusively within elite universities, while the overall degree structure across the broader system remained remarkably stable. This pattern raises a central puzzle: how did STEM become broadly valorized in online discourses when the structural incentives themselves were limited and stratified? A comparative qualitative analysis of Reddit-like elite and non-elite student forums suggested that the explanation lies in the stratified formation and visibility of discourse: elite students articulate institutional narratives more explicitly, framing multiple pathways for career development, and their voices, often valorizing STEM majors, become disproportionately visible in online platforms. Moreover, this stratified rationality in articulating major choices is not simply because elite students choose differently. Institutionally, elite HEIs have more stable historical scorelines and institutional hierarchies, which enable elite students to make planned choices. Ultimately, I argue that the rise of STEM vocationalism in China’s higher education is a processual and stratified revaluation of university majors, emerging from the interaction of institutional data infrastructures, past contingencies, imagined futures, and differentiated capacities for choice.