The Study On Rates Of Return To Higher Education Of Rural Residents

Higher education is an important way of human capital investment and a powerful driving force for the steady development of social politics,economy,culture and other undertakings.For rural residents,only when the investment in higher education gains the corresponding interest from higher education can rural residents continue to invest in higher education.The rates of return to education provides a reference index for measuring the returns on investment in higher education of rural residents.The rate of return to higher education is affected by different factors.It is of great significance to explore the influence mechanism of the rate of return to higher education on the decision-making and investment of rural residents in higher education.On the basis of reviewing the results of existing studies,it is found that the current researches mainly take the theory of human capital as the theoretical basis and estimate the rates of return to education with the model of Mincer earnings equation,and the results are abundant.Among them,the research on the rates of return to education to rural residents mainly focuses on the return to high school education and below,while the research on the rate of return to higher education is few and insufficient,which indicates that the current researchers pay little attention to this issue.To enrich the content of the existing research,this study chose the village D in Inner Mongolia as the research object,using the survey data which was conducted in the village D.Then I based on the human capital theory,labor market segmentation theory and screening hypothesis theory as the foundation,using Mincer earnings equation as the model of this study to estimate the rates of return to higher education to residents who live in village D.First,this paper explores the rates of return to primary education,the rates of return to secondary education as well as the rates of return to higher education,and then I draw a conclusion that the rates of return to higher education is higher than that of primary education and secondary education,and the impact of primary and secondary education on individual income is not significant.Second,this study further explores the differences in gender,different types of higher education and different forms of employment.The main findings are as follows :(1)on the whole,when no controlled variables are taken into the equation,the rates of return to higher education for rural residents is about 11%,which indicates that if residents who lived in village D receive one more year of higher education,they can increase their personal income by 11%;(2)in terms of gender,the rates of return to higher education for women is 11.6%,and that for men is 9.9%.There is a significant difference in the rates of return to higher education between men and women.(3)in terms of the different types of higher education,the rates of return to higher vocational and technical college education is 69.3%,and that of general higher education is 26.6%.The result shows that different types of higher education all have higher rates of return,but higher vocational education plays a greater role in raising personal income than general higher education.(4)in the form of employment,the rate of return to higher education for non-agricultural employment is 3.5%,while the rates of return to higher education for agricultural production doesn't show the significance.The result shows that the form of employment is the factor which affects the rates of return to higher education,but agricultural production has no affect to raise personal income.It indicates that higher education in serving agricultural production is not helpful.Based on the above four findings,the following practical suggestions are put forward: individual and family should(1)increase the investment on higher education in order to establish a foundation for raising personal income;(2)actively change the Stereotypes of higher education,rationally invest on higher education;(3)pay attention to investment in higher education for women and narrow the income gap between different gender;(4)appropriately change the employment patterns to enhance the value of human capital.Higher education institutions and colleges should improve the ability in serving agricultural production and promote the modernization of agricultural production.Local government should make laws or polices to eliminate the gender discrimination in the labor market and create a fair and just employment environment.