Abstract: The returns to education is a measure of the economic returns that individuals get from their investment in education.China is in the historical period of rapid development and deepening transformation and reform in economy and education.Precise estimations of the returns to education and its changing trend as well as their differences among groups are important for the accumulation of human capital,the formulation of education policies and income distribution policies,the marketization process of labor market,and the optimization of personal education decisions.Based on an investigation on the Chinese journal literatures,this paper presents a meta-analysis on the returns to education in China,which reveals that the meta-regressions show obvious heterogeneity between the studies in estimating the returns to education and higher education:(1) the returns to education developed at a decreasing rate between 1988 to 2013,while the returns to higher education increased before 2005 and decreased after that; (2) the returns to education are higher in urban areas than in rural areas,and higher for the female than the male; (3) the returns to education are higher in studies that use instrumental variables methods; (4) the returns to education are different from estimations based on different databases.The significant publication bias is also found,which means that studies with higher statistical significance are more likely to be published.Some agendas are put forward for the future research on the returns to education: improve the researching and estimating methods to conduct more accurate estimation of the causal effect of education on income,explore the trend of the returns to education after 2012,continue to focus on urban-rural difference and gender difference in the returns to education,and conduct more researches on the returns to educational quality.

Key words: the returns to education, meta-analysis, publication bias, the returns to educational quality