Labor Market Segmentation And Family's Decision-Making Of Higher Education

Education,especially the higher education,is an important source of knowledge and an investment in human capital.It also carries the dream of realizing the “upward social and financial mobility”.Therefore,in China,there is a well-known saying “a good scholar will make an official”.However,when we examined the current development of education,we found that the role of education,being a bridge to higher social class,seemed to be diminishing.On one hand,“industrialization of education” and “college enrollment expansion” have increased the cost of education and strengthened the segmentation effect of the capital.People tend to receive education in accordance with their income levels.On the other hand,the people at the higher social level tend to take advantage of education and to find the "decent" jobs.From this point of view,education is gradually becoming the powerful promoter of the Matthew effect.In a stable society,the distribution of all strata is "olive-shaped",and the lower-income residents have the possibility of class upgrading,in which,education plays an important role.If education cannot bear the responsibility of breaking class solidification,then phoenixes soaring out of a chicken coop will be impossible.And it will deprive the bottom-class people of the motivation to struggle.As a result,lower-income residents is not willing to invest in education,and the society will become to "dumbbell-shaped",which is undoubtedly unstable.It is the worry about this situation that motivate this paper.In this paper,social capital is regarded as the medium for the labor market and a family's decision for the higher education.Besides,the labor market segmentation in macro-level and the cost-benefit analysis of education in micro-level are put into the same model.In the framework of this model,the mechanism of how the labor market segmentation affects the decision about higher education,especially of the low-income families,is analyzed.The impact of the labor market segmentation,the college enrollment and the college student loans on the education decision-making of families with different incomes is also analyzed in this paper.The important contents and conclusions of this study are as follows:First of all,with the help of Mincer Function,it was measured that the degree of labor market segmentation,making good use of the gap between the income in the primary labor market and that in the secondary labor market of the same people.The result is that there is obvious labor market segmentation in China.Then,by comparing the labor market segmentation indexes of regions in different levels of economic development,it is found that there are obvious relationships between the labor market segmentation degree,the marketization degree and the level of economic development.The labor market segmentation degree is weakened with the economic development,and is weakened with the improvement of marketization level.The significance of this finding is that,the broken of the barriers between the primary and the secondary labor markets can not only lead to more effective allocation for the labor force,but also lead to further economic development.Secondly,it is found that because of the social capital and the labor market segmentation,some colleges and universities,especially the famous ones,are receiving more children from high-income families and refusing more children from low-income families.Awfully,the children,who was refused,from low-income families,have more human capital than those,who was received,from high-income families.Moreover,the labor market segmentation precisely does harm to the welfare of low-income families,which don't have sufficient social capital to ensure that their children have access to the jobs in the primary labor market.So,the lower-income families have no motivation to support their children to receive higher education,generally resulting low education level.It is impossible for them to achieve superior social status by education.This vicious circle will eventually help to the consolidation of the social stratum.Finally,in this paper,a Logit model is established to test the model.It is found that the amount of social capital possessed by the family will influence their decision-making of the higher education.Moreover,it has a significant impact on the senior high school and the junior college,or undergraduate.In addition,the impact of social capital on family education decisions is more significant where the labor market is seriously segmented.Therefore,breaking the labor market segmentation is meaningful for low-income families' investment in education,and is meaningful to prevent the social stratum consolidation.