Abstract: Education returns have increased significantly in the transitional china. However, it differs among people in different districts, industries, institutions, and sectors. Educational investment becomes even less rewarded due to recruitment expansion in higher education, which has unexpectedly resulted in diploma devaluation and unemployment problem for university graduates. Such complex realities arouse series of thoughtprovoking issues, such as “What is the attitude each education investor held towards his or her own education returns?” Moreover, “what is the relationship between education and one's perception of distributive justice?” At present, there are mainly two theories on perception of distributive justice, that is, the structural explanation and the relative deprived theory. The former proposes that people’s perception of distributive justice is determined by their objective socioeconomic status. The higher socioeconomic status he/she has, the more sense of distributive justice he/she perceives. However, the latter argues that one’s subjective comparison with others with the similar life experiences or social status affects his/her perceptions more significantly than his/her objective status. Hence, this study specifically aims to explain how education affects people’s perception of distributive justice within these two analytic logics. Our empirical results show that both logics make sense, indicating that  the effect of education on perception of distributive justice is much more complex than any single theory has claimed. As an indicator  of people’s superior status, educational background correlates positively with their perception of distributive justice. In other words, the one with higher education degree tends to justify his/her income distribution with favorable attitude. However, this trend changes when the social context or condition varies. As human capital investment, education may evoke one's expectation on his/her income level; that is, the more he/she has invested in education, the more he/she expects to obtain. So, the odds ratio of perception of distributive justice declines significantly with the gap between expected income and actual income increasing gradually, which indicates that the higher education one with, the faster the odds ratio of perception of distributive justice falls. This finding contributes to explain some theoretical paradox and reflects the fact that people may encounter psychological anomie if his or her education investment didn’t pay off. Since climbing upward through education is widely accepted in Chinese society, the finding of this study could also shed light on the situation of people’s judgment on the legitimacy of interest distribution in markettransition.

Key words: education ,  , structural explanation , relative deprived theory ,  , perception of distributive justice,