Higher Education in the Creator Economy: Does a University Degree Guarantee Success?

This study investigates the causal relationship between formal educational attainment and creator success on Bilibili, a leading Chinese video platform. Challenging the prevalent assumption of "degree worship," we examine whether advanced degrees (master's and PhD) directly lead to greater audience reach, engagement, and growth. Utilizing a dataset of 540 samples, I employ a multi-method causal inference approach. I first use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to identify initial correlations, carefully addressing variable specification to avoid "bad controls." To robustly estimate the causal effect, I then apply Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Entropy Balancing, ensuring comparability between educational groups by matching gender, university prestige, and content category. The results consistently reveal a null effect. After controlling for content category, I find no statistically significant direct causal effect of postgraduate education on any success metric, including total views, views per video, followers, likes, or engagement rate. The initial negative correlation observed in simple OLS models is largely explained by selection bias: highly educated creators disproportionately self-select into knowledge-based content categories, which have inherently smaller audience ceilings than entertainment genres. In particular, education does not harm audience engagement. So, the challenge consists of content discoverability. The study concludes that, on Bilibili, higher educational attainment itself has no significant causal impact on creator success. The results challenge the direct application of human capital theory in the creator economy, suggesting that platform-specific skills, such as understanding algorithmic recommendations, selecting viable content categories, and maintaining consistent output, are more decisive than formal academic qualifications. These findings offer important implications for aspiring creators, educational institutions trying to bridge the gap with the digital economy, and platform designers, highlighting a democratized environment where demonstrated skill can outweigh traditional signals of merit.