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

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.