Research On The Influence Of Income Gap On Family Extracurricular Education Expenditure

In recent years,Chinese household extracurricular education participation rate has grown significantly,and family extracurricular education expenditure has increased significantly which puts parents at greater financial pressure.Meanwhile,excessive investment in learning exposes panrents and teachers to the increasing anxiety.In addition,some extracurricular education projects are expensive which makes it easier for the superior social classes to obtain extracurricular education resources,which in turn affects education equity.Based on the particularity of education investment,family extracurricular education expenditure seems a kind of consumption in the short term but in the long run it is an important human capital investment from parents to their children.Investment in extracurricular education given by parents is mainly for higheducation,income and social status in the future which enables the family's social status to improve and the long-term utility would be maximized.The good expectation of this investment is that the family's current extracurricular education expenditure would inevitably make the family obtain a higher level of Social status.Also,the domestic income gap has been increasing year after year which would make social stratification more serious.People with higher social strata could get more social resources which strengthen motivation of people pursuing higher social status.Receiving higher education is likely to change the individual's cognitive level,academic level,interpersonal network and other layers in the desired direction so that people can achieve the goal of changing the individual's social status in the long run which is above changes in income,savings and consumption,etc.The widening income gap is an important reason for the continued increase in family extracurricular education expenditure.This article builds a relatively complete theoretical analysis framework based on the relevant claims of status seeking theory,and conducts an in-depth exploration of the family education expenditure and income gap.Using the panel ordered Probit model and focusing on the data from the fifth period of CFPS 2010-2018,published by the National Bureau of Statistics,we can concluded that in the following:Firstly,it has been demonstrated that education can significantly improve social status.In this paper,the subjective evaluation of the individual's own social status is taken as the dependent variable,and the key explanatory variables are the average years of education of the individual and the reference group.Through the construction of the Probit model,the study found that the individual's educational years have a significant impact on the subjective evaluation of their social status.The positive impact of the reference group 's subjective evaluation of the individual's social status by the average years of education of the reference group showed a significantly negative effect which demonstrated the positive effect of education in promoting status.Investing in education can improve the family Future social status which means thar increasing extra-curricular education input would help children receive a higher level of education and choose schools with bettereducational resources including running conditions and social evaluation in the higher level of education.Secondly,according to the calculation of the CFPS data,the proportion of extracurricular education expenditure in 2017 has reached 66.60%of the total education expenditure,and high-quality school education resources required high school selection fees or "school district housing" which means that families might choose to take extracurricular education when the income gap becomes wider,The study also found that the income gap has a positive effect on the participation rate of extracurricular education,that is,when the income gap widens,people tend to participate in extracurricular education to achieve more investment in education.Thirdly,an empirical analysis shows that expenditures on extracurricular education are positively affected and school education expenditures are negatively affected because of the increasing income gap.It is further proved that increasing extracurricular education expenditure is the main way for people to improve their social status.The research of the thesis makes the following innovations:At first,it integrates the life cycle hypothesis and social status seeking theory in the theoretical analysis,and believes that the current family extracurricular education expenditure would be an investment significantly related to the future social status of the family.Secondly,considering the effect of consumption,we explored that increasing educational investment is for changing cognition degree,academic degree and personal relationship which further develop social status rather than just comparing with others.Thirdly,the identification from peers is equally important for individuals so the competition in status and resources mainly comes more from within the peer or ""Reference group".We choose the reference group in terms of individual's geographical and age level which avoids the problem of too simple at the provincial level and too few samples at the district or county level.Through taking this research,we put forward the following suggestions:firstly,improve China's initial distribution mechanism;secondly,strictly restrict the phenomenon of high consumption of education qualifications and the threshold for establishing famous universities;thirdly,balance education resources and give disadvantaged families subsidies.