Abstract
Many countries around the world commit themselves to providing their citizens with equal access to educational opportunities and an even distribution of educational resources through different policies and measures. The policy initiated by China in the late 1990s to expand college and university enrolment was intended to enable more citizens to gain access to higher education opportunities. However, the rapid expansion of higher education has affected the incomes and job satisfaction of university/college graduates to different degrees. The government and higher education institutions should attend to the negative impact of the massification policy.
In the meantime, the higher education sector expanded rapidly, and resulted in a large number of university/college graduates, who found no corresponding positions. The latest study using Chinese General Social Surveys (2005–2006 and 2012–2013) also documents skills mismatch in the labor market particularly in the recent cohort of young graduates. (Mok and Qian 2018).
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Notes
- 1.
Data source: China National Statistics Yearbook, 1990–1998.
- 2.
If no source was indicated, all data included in this paper came from CLDS 2012.
- 3.
On the debate on quality of higher education, please see Hawkins et al. (2018b).
- 4.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2014) notes that in Asia, ‘There are still large discrepancies in access related to differences in family wealth. The poor remain disproportionately limited in their access to higher education’ (p. 12). Yang (2010) notes the significantly negative impact of the massification of higher education on China’s poor families wherein they rely on education to move up the economic ladder.
- 5.
We do not differentiate jobs in the public or private sector. Public sector remuneration is highly regulated (Wu 2014).
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Ye, L., Wu, A.M., Yang, X. (2018). University Enrolment Expansion and Returns to Higher Education: Evidence from China. In: Wu, A., Hawkins, J. (eds) Massification of Higher Education in Asia. Higher Education in Asia: Quality, Excellence and Governance. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0248-0_9
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