The higher education in our country had began to expand rapidly since 1998, at the same time, the residents’ income gap also present a sharply rising trend, at this stage, did the higher education expansion was beneficial to improve income distribution inequality or make it worse? Based on the 1998-2013 national provincial panel data, and using the threshold regression model to make empirical research on the influence of the higher education expansion to the income gap, will become meaningful. The results show that, the expansion of higher education on the expansion of residents' income gap has significant effect, but with the proportion of receiving higher education group gradually expand, the equality of higher education expansion effect slowly began to reflect, the effect of higher education expansion caused the residents' income gap relatively reduced, but the higher education expansion always did not have the effect of improving residents' income gap.