近年来在大学毕业生就业难、起薪低的现象和背景下，重点大学毕业生相对于普通大学毕业生在就业时的优势越来越大，成为中小学阶段家庭课外教育大量投入以期提高升学质量的重要原因。然而，理论上和我们的初步分析均表明，重点大学教育在初入职场的工资优势并不意味着在全部职业生涯的优势。随工作经验的积累，雇主能更准确地观察到个人工作能力，工资对毕业学校声誉依赖渐弱、对个人工作能力依赖渐强。本课题从研究重点大学教育回报率、个人技能回报率在个人职业生涯的动态变化趋势入手，进一步分析两者间的关系以及它们在经济增长速度不同的地区、市场化程度不同的地区和部门的异质性。在此基础上，我们将构建家庭基础教育投资需求模型，描述家庭教育支出与升学和不同类型大学预期回报的关系，并阐明其对升学和工资产生正向影响的条件。本项目的研究结果将对家庭基础教育投资决策和政府的教育资源分配提供指导和借鉴。

In recent years, college graduates in general face increasingly more fierce competition in job search and diminishing starting salaries. Meanwhile, graduates of the small number of elite universities have become more popular among employers and can secure a much higher starting salary. This is an important reason for continued increases in household investment in after-school classes in the basic education stage in order to gain a better chance of admission to an elite university. However, theory and our preliminary analyses suggest that the large advantage of an elite university degree at the labor market entry may not translate into a higher return over one’s entire career. Over time, employers accumulate more accurate information about workers’ true productivity and will rely less on university reputation but more on one’s actual productivity for setting wages. This project estimates how the elite university premium over ordinary universities varies over one’s career and how the returns to skills vary over one’s career and their interactions. Given the large variation in the degree of marketization by region and employee ownership, we investigate the heterogeneity of these two dynamics. We model how household educational investment relates to the expected labor market returns to different types of university education. By providing richer information on the returns to an elite university degree, this research may have important implications for households’ educational investment decisions and government resource allocation at different schooling levels and different types of higher education institutions.