Perceived Returns to Graduate Education and Early-Career Choices in China

Last registered on September 28, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Perceived Returns to Graduate Education and Early-Career Choices in China
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0019779
Initial registration date
September 20, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
September 28, 2026, 8:45 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Yuan Tian
Affiliation
Beijing Normal University
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Dan Wang
PI Affiliation
Beijing Normal University
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-09-21
End date
2027-09-21
Keywords
Labor, Other
Additional Keywords
Graduate education; perceived returns to education; subjective expectations; job search; discrete choice experiment; early-career choices
JEL code(s)
I23; J24; C35; C93
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
We conduct an incentivized field experiment in China to study how young adults perceive the labor-market returns to graduate education and how these perceptions shape early-career choices. Participants complete a series of hypothetical choices involving employment and graduate education decisions. We use these data to estimate perceived returns to graduate education and further compare choice-based revealed beliefs with directly elicited beliefs and examine heterogeneity across career stages and individual characteristics.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Tian, Yuan and Dan Wang. 2026. "Perceived Returns to Graduate Education and Early-Career Choices in China." AEA RCT Registry. September 28. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.19779-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
n/a
Intervention Start Date
2026-09-21
Intervention End Date
2027-09-21

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
• Ex-post employment choice: Whether the respondent selects employment profile A rather than profile B in each binary choice task.
• Ex-ante early-career choice: The probability that the respondent accepts the current job offer, rejects it and continues searching, or rejects it and accepts the graduate-school offer.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
The revealed-belief outcomes combine ex-post preference estimates with ex-ante choice probabilities. Ex-post estimates map material and non-material job attributes into job quality. The ex-ante model uses reported probabilities of choosing among work, continued job search, and graduate education to recover beliefs about future employment distributions with and without graduate education.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
• Directly stated beliefs about job-offer arrival under bachelor’s- and master’s-degree scenarios.
• Directly stated beliefs about admission to graduate school.
• Willingness to pay for selected job attributes, including employer type and weekly working days.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We conduct two choice experiments to students and early-career employers in China. The first measures preferences over job characteristics; the second presents choices among accepting a job, continuing to search, and entering graduate school. We study the belief of graduate education returns in China by combining these two experiments.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization occurs at the participant level. Participants are randomized across 20 predefined modules, each of which pairs one of ten ex-post task blocks with one of ten ex-ante task blocks. Within the ex-post module, the A/B placement of profiles and the display order of attributes are randomized.
Randomization Unit
Participant.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
n/a
Sample size: planned number of observations
1000 participants, subject to replacement of observations rejected under pre-specified platform or data-quality rules.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
n/a
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
n/a
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Science and Technology Ethics Committee of Shaanxi Normal University
IRB Approval Date
2026-09-14
IRB Approval Number
202616032
Analysis Plan

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