Is Higher Education Family Shadow Education Spending More: A Survey Based on Propensity Score Matching

Education is an important way to realize the social mobility. As a supplement to education resources, the shadow education is also an important means for parents to help their children improve their competitiveness. Existing studies have shown that family shadow education expenditure is influenced by factors such as the students' home areas and the degree of parents' education. However, it is very rare to study the net effect of parents' college education on family shadow education expenditure. In this paper, the baseline data of China education tracking survey is selected. We used the method of propensity score matching to analyze the relationship between the parents' higher education and the expenditure of family shadow education. The study found that, after matching the common confounding variables, there was no significant difference between the parents' access to higher education and the family shadow education expenditure in the whole sample and the urban sample, but the difference was significant in the rural sample. Based on the research results, this paper suggests that Chinese urban families should treat shadow education rationally and enrich the ways of cultural capital transfer, while in rural areas it is necessary to strengthen the public input of educational resources and improve the equity of education.