中国教育回报的结构与变迁(2003—2021):层级差异、时间趋势和社会结构因素

Chinese Education Return from 2003 to 2021:Stratification,Trend,and Social Structural Change

本文使用中国社会综合调查(CGSS)2003—2021年共12期的合并数据,分析中国多年来不同教育层级的经济回报变化趋势,并探讨高等教育的经济回报是否有明显下降。本研究首先测量了不同教育层级的收入回报差异并展示其变迁趋势,随后采用因素分解法,评估市场岗位环境等五个维度的社会结构因素的变化对不同教育层级经济回报的影响。结果显示,不同教育层级的经济回报在近20年整体维持在比较稳定的范围;社会结构的变化一方面增加了高等教育群体相对于高中学历群体的经济回报,另一方面又缩小了其他教育层级群体之间的收入差距;从出生队列来看,20世纪70年代到90年代出生群体的高等教育经济回报未发生明显变化;市场岗位增加等结构因素的变动有助于维持高等教育回报的相对稳定。

Although education return has always been a hot topic in Chinese sociology,most of the existing studies focus on exploring causal relationships and heterogeneous effects in individual life courses,and efforts to track the long-term trend at the macro-level remain scarce.Using pooled samples comprising 12 waves of data from the CGSS surveys between 2003 and 2021,we analyse the trends in earnings at different education levels in China over the last two decades and examine whether the economic returns to higher education have experienced a significant decline.Using high school graduates as the reference group,the study first measures the differences in economic returns of different education levels relative to the high school-educated population and presents the trend of change over the last two decades.Next,we employ the factor decomposition framework to assess the impact of long-term changes in five dimensions of social structural factors,such as market environment on the economic returns of different education levels.The results show that,with the exception of the postgraduate group,the overall economic returns for all education levels have remained in a relatively stable range over the last two decades.By controlling for social structural factors at the 2021 level for each wave,we find that long-term changes in social structure have increased the income advantage of the higher educated people relative to high-school population on the one hand,but have narrowed the income gap between groups in other educational levels on the other hand.By analysing the birth cohorts of the samples,we also find that the economic returns to higher education are significantly higher for the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts than for those born after 1970,but the economic returns to higher education remain relatively stable between the 1970s and 1990s birth cohorts.With the expansion of higher education,changes in structural factors such as the increase of high-level jobs have contributed to the relative stability or slight increase of economic returns to higher education in China.