Exploring the Impact of Interrupted Education on Earnings The Educational Cost of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
In 1966, the Chinese Communist Party began a political event–the Cultural Revolution (CR) during which most urban schools in China ceased normal operation for a long time, senior high schools stopped student recruitment for up to 6 years, while universities stopped student recruitment for an even longer period (Unger, 1982; Deng and Treiman, 1997; and Meng and Gregory, 2002). Over the entire course of the 11-years of the Cultural Revolution a generation of urban young people was affected in terms of school outcomes. Some cohort groups missed as much as 4 to 6 years of schooling. Many individuals missed a chance to obtain a university degree or a senior high school qualification.
The question naturally arises as to how such large scale school interruptions affect lifetime earnings. There are few studies of this topic. Recently, however, Ichino and Winter-Ebmer (2004) found, for a number of European countries, that those individuals who would have obtained higher education, but because of World War II did not, suffered a considerable loss of earnings. The Cultural Revolution experience can add a new dimension to this literature.
The emphasis of this paper is on two issues. First, the extent to which the interrupted education in urban China during the Cultural Revolution affected subsequent education attainment of the cohort (referred to as the Interrupted Education Cohort, IE cohort, or IEC, hereafter). Second, the impact of interrupted education on subsequent earnings of the IE cohort in the 1990s and early 2000s due to the lack of educational achievement.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides background on the education disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, defines the control groups, and discusses the data. Section 3 investigates the effect of the Cultural Revolution on educational attainment. Section 4 examines the earnings’ effect of school interruptions. Section 5 pulls the various parts of the study together to investigate the long term cost of the interrupted education due to the Cultural Revolution. Section 6 offers concluding comments.
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