The scale of higher education in China continues to expand, but the problem of uneven distribution of educational opportunities remains prominent. Differences in family background have a profound impact on children’s educational development, and there are obvious gaps in access to educational resources among different social classes. Using data from the China Family Tracking Survey (CFPS) 2020-2024, this paper explores the mechanisms by which family socioeconomic resources affect the distribution of children’s educational opportunities through binary logistic regression modeling and structural equation modeling. The study decomposed family socioeconomic resources into three dimensions: cultural capital, economic capital and social capital, and used entropy weighting method for comprehensive evaluation. The results showed that: the overall prediction rate of the model was 86.78% correct; parental education and father’s occupation had a significant effect on children’s educational opportunities (p<0.001); educational expectations played a mediating role in the distribution of children's educational opportunities influenced by family socio-economic resources, with the mediating effect accounting for 66.35%; and the input of school resources negatively moderated the influence of family socio-economic resources on educational opportunities (p=0.012 ). The study found that family socioeconomic resources affect children's educational opportunities mainly through the indirect paths of educational expectations and school quality, which provides empirical evidence for understanding the generation mechanism of educational inequality.
