Regional Path Differentiation and Convergence in the Massification of Higher Education in China Mainland: A Dual Framework of Quantitative Expansion and Structural Upgrading

Abstract

Existing scholarship on the massification of higher education in China has typically relied on single indicators or composite indices to capture educational expansion, focusing primarily on how rising enrolment rates or increasing average years of schooling shape economic growth and regional inequality. Yet it has seldom distinguished between two qualitatively different processes, namely improvements in overall educational attainment and the structural upgrading of higher education, which limits our ability to identify concrete regional trajectories of expansion. To address this gap, this study employs panel data for thirty one provincial level regions in mainland China from 1997 to 2024, measuring attainment improvement by the cumulative change in average years of schooling and structural upgrading by the cumulative change in the share of the population holding a college degree or above. Using the full sample median as the threshold, a four quadrant framework is constructed to classify provincial expansion paths. The results show that China’s higher education massification does not exhibit a single convergence pattern; instead, it forms four relatively stable trajectories, including the dual track leap type, the mass expansion type, the structural upgrading type, and the slow expansion type. Overall educational attainment and higher education structural upgrading frequently evolve at different speeds across provinces: some regions achieve coordinated progress on both dimensions, some expand broadly before upgrading, some advance structure ahead of widespread attainment gains, while others remain relatively constrained on both dimensions. These findings indicate that the most consequential differences in educational expansion lie not simply in the magnitude of improvement, but in how quantitative expansion and structural upgrading are combined. By shifting the analytical focus from scale based comparisons to trajectory identification, this study offers a clearer framework for understanding regional heterogeneity in human capital accumulation and its linkages with industrial restructuring and population mobility.