Abstract:

This article aims at discussing whether there exists a phenomenon of "educational deepening" since the expansion of new enrolments in Chinese universities and colleges. Firstly, we revise the model, originally built by J.C. van Ours & G. Ridder (1995), which deals with the interrelationship among the workers with different educational backgrounds.Then, we choose such variables as college graduates and non–college graduates to set up an econometric model on the basis of our revised model. Under the conditions of controlling the factors which influence the wages, numbers of job applicants, etc., we use the available panel data at China’s provincial level from 2002 to 2007 to demonstrate that the rate of employment between college students and that of non–college students are influenced each other and further identify the existence of "educational deepening". Therefore, we propose a policy to encourage the high–tech industries to grow so as to decrease the unemployment rate of college graduates; in the meanwhile, we propose another policy to support the development of vocational schools as well as to set a ceiling of the new enrolments of college students, so as to alleviate the problem of unemployment of non–college graduates.

Keywords: "educational deepening", college graduates, non–college graduates, unemployment