What Can Students Gain from China's Higher Education?

Hongbin Li, Huan Wang, Claire Cousineau and Matthew Boswell

Asian Economic Policy Review, 2023, vol. 18, issue 2, 287-304

Abstract: China's higher education system has undergone a rapid expansion over the last two decades. By drawing on hand‐collected data, we explore students' experiences in college and in the labor market post‐graduation in the wake of this expansion. According to our data, the largest employer of college graduates in the labor market was the state sector, followed by the domestic private sector. To explain the returns to college education in China, we explore three mechanisms: human capital, social networks, and signaling. We find that human capital measures, apart from a student's college English test scores, cannot explain the college wage premium, whereas both social networks (for example, membership of the Communist Party) and signaling matter significantly. This seems to indicate that in China, connections are crucial for student success in the labor market, whereas the higher education system itself is more a system for selecting talented individuals than it is for educating them. Finally, students allocate their time accordingly, for example, by spending more time studying English in college than any other subject.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12426

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:asiapr:v:18:y:2023:i:2:p:287-304

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1832-8105

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Economic Policy Review is currently edited by Takatoshi Ito, Akira Kojima, Colin McKenzie and Shujiro Urata

More articles in Asian Economic Policy Review from Japan Center for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().