Labour market performance of young migrant workers with heterogeneous educational trajectories in China

Successful global cities present a spectrum of development strategies but share the benefit of the reciprocal dynamics between tailored education systems and matching labour markets. This paper examines burgeoning cities in China and investigates the effects of the heterogeneous educational trajectories of young migrant workers in urban China on their labour market performance. Drawing on the National Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey, this paper finds striking wage variations among the young migrant population. Migrant workers who attended high schools in current receiving cities earned less than their counterparts who received senior-secondary education elsewhere. Students following the academic track were better off than students following the vocational track. To further explore what has prevented the urban labour market from rewarding migrants who studied in a receiving city, where the education system is expected to better cater to the city’s specific industrial needs, we tested and found evidence of the mediating effects of job industry and occupation. In addition to engaging with empirical debates in the field, this paper develops a theoretical framework to model how the qualitative attributes of an education system affect wage variations among migrant workers.