ABSTRACT
While income level and education attainment have risen in all the social groups of Shanghai in the past decades, people with higher education tend to have higher earning and higher status jobs. Higher education has become a strategic means to climb the earning ladder and to achieve social mobility. Accordingly, large scale expansion has taken place in universities, providing additional space for the increasing number of students as well as for the upgrading of teaching facilities. Taking the chance of real estate development such as land clearance and infrastructure building, universities have emerged as key ingredients in the changing patterns of community development planning as well as inner city renewal and peri-urbanization.
