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The Changing Happiness-Enhancing Effect of a College Degree Under Higher Education Expansion: Evidence from China

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Abstract

Although the average enhancing effect of higher education on subjective wellbeing has been confirmed in many previous studies, we still know little about how such an effect may change in an era of higher education expansion. Drawing on representative data collected in urban China, this study illustrates a nonparametric analytical framework and highlights a declining trend in the average enhancing effect of a college credential on subjective wellbeing between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, growing heterogeneity in the positive association between higher education and happiness among urban residents was detected. The findings of this study suggest a “quality–quantity” tradeoff with regard to the desirable consequences of higher education for subjective wellbeing amidst the process of credential proliferation.

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Notes

  1. In this light, both relative income and absolute income can lead to an individual’s subjective wellbeing (Ball and Chernova 2008).

  2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for directing us to this literature. As we will show below, higher education and perceived life quality start to exhibit a negative relationship for some individuals in the process of HEE.

  3. See Hu and Hibel (2013) for further discussion of heterogeneity of economic returns among Chinese college graduates.

  4. Because different matching algorithms generate similar results, we have not presented the descriptive findings using other algorithms.

  5. For the raw sample, the difference was 0.23 in 2003 and 0.14 in 2010.

  6. We very much thank a reviewer for directing us to the potential ecological fallacy problem.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Junior Scholar Project of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China “The Impacts of Educational Attainment on Health Status” (13YJC840014), the Research Initiation Project Funding for New Faculty Members of Fudan University, and the Capability Promotion Project Funding of Fudan University.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Fudan University, 1137, Liberal Arts Building, Handan Road, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Anning Hu

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Correspondence to Anning Hu.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 4 and Tables 2 and 3.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Results of robust check in bandwidth selection. Data Sources The CGSS 2003 and 2010. Note LCV likelihood cross validation, LSCV least square cross validation

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Table 2 The result of the probit model predicting propensity score
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Table 3 Descriptive statistics
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Hu, A. The Changing Happiness-Enhancing Effect of a College Degree Under Higher Education Expansion: Evidence from China. J Happiness Stud 16, 669–685 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-014-9528-1

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