Chinese residents’ environmental concern and expectation of sending children to study abroad

Abstract

The majority of existing studies find that Chinese residents would like to send children to study abroad for higher education quality and multiple opportunities. Previous studies have paid little attention to the association of this issue with environmental degradation in recent years. Merging data on adults from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2016 with data on children, this paper investigates the effect of environmental concern on the educational level at which Chinese residents are willing to send children to study abroad based on the ordered logit model and Heckman Probit Model (HPM). The results show that environmental concern predicted a positive attitude toward a willingness to send children to study abroad at a decreased schooling level after concerns about the Chinese education system and educational expectations for children and other sociodemographic factors were controlled for. The marginal effects of environmental concern on expectations of sending children to study abroad at different educational levels showed that increasing environmental concern leads to the probability of residents considering sending children to study abroad during junior college or below increasing, while it leads to the probability of residents considering sending their children to study abroad during undergraduate or higher education decreasing. The HPM further verified that environmental concern had a positive effect on residents’ willingness of sending their children to study during junior college or below. The study offers an important early step in the empirical testing of the relationship between Chinese residents’ environmental concern and the educational level at which they would consider sending children to study abroad.