Regression results for five Chinese provinces provide stronger empirical support than hitherto for the role of farmer education in productivity gains. However, these results are largely due to the inclusion of two small groups of outliers: one consists of very poor households whose heads have no education and the other, relatively well‐off households whose heads have only three years of education. This article illustrates the need for a cautious interpretation of the regression results of earlier studies, because they could be affected by problems of outliers, multicollinearity and omitted variable bias.