Impact of Higher Educational Expansion on Age at First Marriage in China, 1999-2002

The proposed study will investigate the impacts of higher education expansion in China from 1999 to 2002 on age at first marriage of those who attended colleges and during the expansion period. The college attendance rate of high school graduates it soared to 63.8% in 2000 from 46.1 in 1999 and reached the highest level of 83.5% in 2002. Previous studies have so far focused on its impact on educational inequality along social lines, such as family background, gender, ethnicity, and urbanicity, with little attention to other possible important consequences.
The proposed study will address the impact of higher education expansion from the end of the 1990s onwards on the marital behavior of those who attended colleges and universities during the expansion period. Specifically, this study will examine both cohort and group variations in age at first marriage in China in light of the higher education expansion. Non-parametric and parametric survival models will be used to compare the 1999-2002 college cohort with its younger and older counterparts, conditional on other factors.