China’s College Expansion and the Timing of the College-to-Work Transition: A Natural Experiment

Lingxin Hao and Dong Zhang

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2020, vol. 688, issue 1, 93-114

Abstract: This article examines the effect of China’s 1999 acceleration of higher education expansion on when college graduates find their first skilled job. We use a natural experiment to test our hypotheses and exploit the unique education and work history data of a nationally representative survey, as well as estimate a causal inference model. We find that the 1999 education expansion caused a delay in the landing of a skilled job among graduates from technical colleges, while graduates from four-year colleges were not affected in job acquisition. We also find that family origins and individual social positions are significant determinants of who entered college both before and after the education expansion. These findings shed new light on the workings of early adulthood and on social inequality in China.

Keywords: China; college graduate; higher educational expansion; skilled employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716220906791 (text/html)

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:sae:anname:v:688:y:2020:i:1:p:93-114

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220906791

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().