Working and living conditions of China's college-educated rural migrants

In the past decade or so, China’s cities have witnessed an increasing number of college-educated rural migrants. However, there has been little systematic research on the labor market performance and living conditions of this growing population. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the differences between college-educated rural migrants, less-educated rural migrants, and local urban workers in terms of labor market performance and living conditions. The dataset comes from a large-scale nationwide survey on the working and living conditions of the floating population in 2010 by the China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. The results show that, first of all, the monthly income of college-educated rural migrants is significantly higher than that of less-educated rural migrants, and is close to that of college-educated local urban workers. In the meanwhile, the monthly income of less-educated rural migrants is higher than that of less-educated local urban counterparts. College-educated rural migrants and college-educated urban workers earn similar hourly wages. Second, college-educated rural migrants work less time than less-educated rural migrants, as college-educated rural migrants work less days a week and less hours a day. However, they work more days a week and more hours a day than local urban counterparts. Third, college-educated rural migrants are entitled to better social security benefits than less-educated rural migrants, but they get worse social security benefits than local urban workers. Overall, college-educated rural migrants, while enjoying better working and living conditions than less-educated rural migrants, suffer a considerable gap when compared with urban workers with a similar level of education, largely owing to institutionalized exclusion and discrimination. This has erected significant barriers for rural-origin people to reap the benefits of higher education.

Key words: China; college-educated rural migrants; education; income; social security