Migration of Higher Educated Graduates and the Consequences of China's 1999 Expansion of Higher Education Admission

Abstract

With the development of China's higher education, its scale of investment has significantly expanded. Especially since 1999, when a major reform occurred, the number of post-secondary institutions and the post-secondary admissions rate of each province has increased sharply, more than ever before. The expansion of admission to higher education since 1999 has largely changed the original state of China's higher education. My research question is, although almost all provinces in China strongly reacted to this reform, whether provinces have kept educated graduates within their province after investing physical and human capital in expanding admissions. To answer that question, I try to find the relationship between the number of post-secondary institutions, admissions, and university or college educated employees in each province by using various Chinese official databases, including, China Education Yearbook, China Labour Yearbook, National Bureau of Statistics of China. I find that across all provinces, on average, when increasing admission to higher education by one student, provinces keep one educated graduate within their province. However, the story is more complex when I look at a scatter plot relating employees with completed higher education to the province’s post-secondary admissions. In reality, China’s five richest provinces are attracting many of the new university graduates, while the other 26 provinces keep only an average of 0.57 educated employees for each new admission after the 1999 reform. So the five provinces were the winners of the reform in this sense. I begin my paper with a literature review, where I study several journal papers about the use by governments of some developing and undeveloped countries of interventions to increase enrollment rates and years of schooling. In the following section, I provide details about the background of higher education in China. Information about the definition of higher education in China and the history of Chinese higher education admission can explain why the 1999 admission expansion reform is the most important in the Chinese higher education system, and what Chinese government interventions did after the 1999 admission expansion. Finally, I explain my data sources and regression specifications and present and discuss my results. I end the paper with a brief conclusion.