Abstract
College graduates, as a labor force with high human capital accumulation, have the problem of initial wage inequality, which is worth paying attention to. Based on the collated micro-survey data form “Employment and Entrepreneurship Development Report of Chinese College Graduates”, which contains 339 samples from vocational colleges, 453 from common colleges, and 360 from key colleges, this study empirically analyzed the inequality of college graduates’ initial wages at the college level. We found that the initial wage income level of college graduates is significantly influenced by the college level. The higher the level is, the higher the initial wage. The initial wage of graduates from key colleges is the highest, and the income inequality between them and vocational college graduates is the most significant. Moreover, there are structural differences in the wage premium effect of the college level on college graduates with a change in wage level. In addition, the study found that there is an obvious gender wage difference among college graduates, and political status, academic ranking, and student cadre experience as well as the nature of the workplace all contributed to the formation of wage premiums to a certain extent.
Highlights
Since one of the main goals of individuals entering the labor market is to obtain wage income through employment, wage income determines to a large extent the economic status of workers and is one of the important references reflecting the quality of their employment
The regression coefficient of the gender variable is significantly positive, indicating that the initial wage of male college graduates is higher than that of female college graduates, which means that there is still gender wage variance in high humancapital groups; the regression results of political outlook show that if college graduates are party members, their initial wage will be about 8% higher than that of non-party college graduates; the regression coefficient of score ranking was significantly positive, which is consistent with the descriptive statistical results, indicating that the better the college graduates perform, the higher the initial wage of the graduates will be; if a college graduate has served as a student cadre during the period, his/her initial wage will be about 6%
Higher than that of other college graduates, and the regression coefficient of the location nature variable of the contracting unit of the college graduate is significantly positive at the 1% level, indicating that the wages earned by college graduates working in provincial capital cities are higher than those in non-provincial capital cities, while college graduates working in townships/rural areas have the lowest initial wages, which may be due to the economic development level of the workplace and the impact on the local labor market wage level
Summary
Since one of the main goals of individuals entering the labor market is to obtain wage income through employment, wage income determines to a large extent the economic status of workers and is one of the important references reflecting the quality of their employment. Triventi (2013) used the monthly initial wage of college graduates in 11 European countries as the dependent variable, adopted the Blinder–Oaxaca wage difference decomposition method to test the degree of gender discrimination, adding factors such as human capital and job characteristics to the measurement model, and found that job characteristics include influencing factors such as job type, occupation, position, and department [27] This extends the research on the matching of academic use with the occupation. Ichino, and Rustichini (2014) conducted a comparative study on the intergenerational mobility of occupation types, work income, and educational level in the United States and Italy, and the results confirmed family background as an important factor that affects the employment results and income level of the labor market [32].There are significant gender differences in the initial wage of college graduates, and this phenomenon has been captured by many other scholars. Taking the Chinese higher-education system into research, the research on income inequality with different college levels has especially important social and theoretical implications
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