Studies show that parental educational expectations (PEEs) serve as an intermediary variable between family background and children’s educational attainment. This paper re-examines the relationship between PEEs and children’s higher educational attainment using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2010–2018. To address potential endogenous problems in the previous papers, we use the average College Enrolment Opportunity Index (CEOI) when the children were 10–12 years old as an instrumental variable for PEEs. The results revealed that: (1) In addition to the indirect intermediary effects, the PEEs also had a direct impact on children’s higher educational attainment independent of family background; (2) the magnitude of the effect was much larger (almost three times) than previous estimates after solving endogenous problems; (3) there was no significant gender difference in the effect of PEEs. In addition, we also found that PEEs had a greater impact on middle- and low-income families. Therefore, we argue that against the background of the “Double Reduction” policy, parents should change their conception of education and raise their expectations for their children and encourage them to strive for higher educational achievements.
During the last few decades, China implemented college enrollment expansion to accelerate the process of urbanization. However, most existing papers blaming that receiving higher education may delay people choosing to enter the age of first marriage, which in turn results in the age of the population. In this paper, we argued that the previous papers confused the total impact of higher education on the average age of the first marriage with the influence on individual’s behavior change, and thus led to overestimating the delayed effect of higher education on the age choosing behavior of first marriage. The present paper re-estimated the impact of higher education on the average age of the first marriage in China with both extensive and intensive margins using the duration model and qualified the pure effect on the behavior patterns change after removing macroeconomic factors. The results show that: (1) changes in either the demographic structure or behavior patterns due to higher education explain 63.41% or 36.59%, respectively, of the average marriage age delay; (2) the macro factors would delay the age of first marriage; (3) after controlling for demographic structure and macro factors, 3 years or more of higher education would only delay the choosing behavior of entering the first marriage by 0.84 years. Thus, we concluded that higher education does not completely squeeze the time of marriage, and the expansion of college enrollment could improve social and economic benefits.
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