Internet,Rural Middle School Education And Human Capital Investment

My research object is the human capital of rural middle school students that are defined as middle school students living and studying in rural areas.The reason why I choose rural middle school students' human capital as the research object is that middle school education is the key stage of forming the gap of individual human capital between rural and urban areas.With the implementation of nine-year compulsory education in China,middle school students face different ways of human capital accumulation after graduation.Rural middle school students can not only choose to study further for human capital investment,but also choose to enter the labor market directly.If rural middle school students choose to pursue secondary vocational education after graduation,their capacity for work will be improved,and then they can get more economic income return.On the other hand,rural middle school students could choose to continue ordinary senior high school after graduation,and then have the opportunity to obtain education of higher level in the future,and their future human capital and work capacity will be improved to a greater extent.The research significance of this paper includes the following three points:Firstly,rural middle school students that account for more than half of the total,are weaker in the accumulation of human capital than the students living in the urban areas.Improving rural middle school students' human capital is conducive to narrowing the gap between urban and rural development,which is an important guarantee to achieve the overall poverty alleviation and to prevent the return to poverty.Human capital is generally considered as an important factor for wealth creation by economists.It has been generally agreed by economists that human capital investment can solve the problem of poverty and backwardness and promote the endogenous growth of economy.In poor areas,there may be some problems that are not conducive to their sustainable development,such as the lack of innate resources,the current comparably small economic size and low economic quality.Compared with the decline of other resources,human capital is the endogenous power to promote rural areas to get rid of poverty and realize a well-off society in an all-round way.Improving rural middle school students' human capital is the key means to increase their family income by the application of new technology.Improvement of rural middle school students' human capital is conducive to narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas,and is an important guarantee to achieve the overall poverty alleviation and prevent the return to poverty.Secondly,this study focuses on rural middle school students' choice of human capital investment,taking the analysis of expected component income of rural middle school students as the research starting point.I explored the factors that affected rural middle school students' choice of human capital investment from the micro perspective.I constructed the choice model of rural middle school students' human capital investment in combination with the theory of expected value,and provides the explanation of individual education choice for the existing research.This paper studies the choice of rural middle school students' human capital investment,which is conducive to the analysis of the supply of senior high school education to rural middle school students under the background of popularizing senior high school education,especially in the context of the implementation of the policy that general vocational education is roughly equivalent.At the same time,using the method of questionnaire survey,this study can help to understand the influence of various factors of the education process experienced by rural middle school students on individual human capital investment choice,which is conducive to providing policy basis for promoting the popularization of higher and middle education.It is of great significance to promote and popularize the high-school level education in China.At present,China still faces a huge gap in the enrollment rate between urban and rural middle schools.It is of great significance to guide rural middle school students to invest in human capital to realize the division of general and vocational education,as rural middle school students are the main source of secondary vocational education,as well as the balanced and diversified talent development strategy.Thirdly,how to change the backward education level in rural areas has always been a problem explored by many experts and scholars.An important aspect of backward rural education is the lack of teacher resources in rural areas and the serious loss of excellent teachers in rural areas.In the era of “Internet +”,the education poverty alleviation project based on modern network education technology has more advantages in convenience,low cost and continuity.Through the mode of “double teaching program” in which teachers promote the application of Internet resources,the problems of low participation rate and high dropout rate in “MOOC” are solved.The use of modern Internet education technology by teachers is conducive to broaden teaching ideas and enhance teaching ability,and then the problem of lack of high-quality teachers in rural areas can be solved.This study broadens the research ideas for the application of “Internet + education” technology to improve the quality of education in rural areas,and provides a policy basis for improving the quality of rural education and the human capital of students through modern online education.This paper aims at improving rural middle school students' human capital and the three levels of research below constitute the structure of the system of scientific methods.In the first level,I calculated rural middle school students' human capital from the micro perspective,and compared the differences between the inter schools and provincial average level.I found that rural middle school students need to increase their human capital investment through difference decomposition,so studying how to guide rural middle school students to invest in human capital is of significance in the second level.In the second level of research,I explored the factors that affected the choice of rural middle school students' human capital investment and found that improving the quality of rural education was conducive to middle school students' human capital investment,and then introduced the third level of research on how to improve the quality of rural middle school education.In the third level of research,I described how the Internet technology changed rural middle school education from theory to practice,and estimated the impact of the Internet on rural junior middle school education through empirical analysis.Thus,the measurement,investment and development of rural junior high school students' human capital are integrated.The innovation of this paper can be summarized as follows:Firstly,I put forward the calculation method of school level rural middle school students' human capital for the first time.Some studies have measured the human capital of rural middle school students in various provinces,such as China Human Capital Project.Rural middle school students' human capital at the provincial level is based on the average of the labor force level of the whole province,which can't reflect the human capital situation of the real poverty-stricken areas in the province.Therefore,there is a lack of accurate analysis on the policy of poverty alleviation.Accurate data measurement support is not conducive to policy research and analysis.I compared the results with the provincial average level,and the contribution degree of human capital difference caused by education quality and regional economic factors were estimated.The results of the estimation method can be used to describe the human capital status of school level micro rural middle school students,which is complementary to the traditional macro human capital measurement.Secondly,on the issue of how to guide the rural middle school graduates to make the choice of human capital investment,I integrated value expectation theory into the choice model of entering school,which filled in the blank of analyzing and studying the choice of entering school from the perspective of economic return.In order to describe the motivation of rural middle school students' human capital investment choice more accurately,I added the expected return of investment choice in the rural middle school students' choice model.In order to accurately estimate the impact of various factors on the choice of rural middle school students' human capital investment,I took the different internal structure and assumptions of the model into account,especially taking the expected return on human capital investment as the explanatory variable,and uses a more cutting-edge mixed logic model instead of the commonly used multiple logic model or conditional logic model.In addition to the perspective of family background,education mode and heterogeneity,the average expected life of rural middle school graduates with different choices calculated by J-F life-long income method is included in the influencing factors for analysis.Thirdly,I established a theoretical model to describe how the Internet changes rural middle school education.Based on the classical literature hypothesis,the theoretical model introduces the Internet educational technology resources as non-competitive and nonexclusive services available to teachers into the formation process of students' human capital.Under the assumption of maximizing social welfare,I deduced the changes of students' human capital caused by the impact of Internet education,and decomposed the changes of students' human capital into substitution effects and complementarities effect,in which substitution effect refers to the substitution of high-quality video resources in teaching activities under Internet education,and complementary effect refers to the use of Internet education resources by local teachers to conduct complementary teaching and change their own teaching quality.Fourthly,I filled in the blank of empirical research on the relationship between Internet education and rural middle school students' human capital.At present,there was few empirical research data of Internet education.This study investigated the “double teaching program” of Internet education.This program introduced Internet education resources as practical intervention to teachers and students in rural schools that are less exposed to internet education.This study designed the questionnaire of students,teachers and school leaders for the “double teaching program”,collected the information of teachers and students in the experimental school for empirical analysis,applied a variety of econometric models,and for the first time explored the specific influence channels of Internet education technology on rural education level.In terms of research methods,this research established a theoretical model of rural middle school students' human capital measurement,rural middle school students' human capital investment and the impact of the Internet on rural middle school based on literature review;secondly,a variety of data mining methods and questionnaire survey methods were applies to collect data;finally,I used a variety of econometric and statistical methods to do the data analysis,including: improved J-F lifetime income method was used to measure rural middle school students' human capital.The decomposition method of human capital differences referred to Oaxaca-Blinder mean decomposition theory.Mixed logic model was applied to explore the impact of expected life-time income and other factors on rural middle school students' choices of human capital investment.Basic difference-in-difference model,extended difference-in-difference model and quantile regression models were applied to explore the impact of Internet Education on students' performance.This paper includes six chapters.The first chapter introduces the research background,purpose and scope by reviewing literature,as well as analyzing the theoretical basis of the research,analyzing and planning the research ideas,research methods and research content,putting forward the expected results,analyzing the significance of the research and summarizing the main innovation points.The second chapter is literature review from research perspectives of formation and evolution of human capital theory,human capital measurement methods,students' choice of human capital investment and the relationship between Internet Education and human capital.The third chapter estimates the human capital of rural middle school students in China,and decomposes the differences between the inter school and provincial average level.Based on the J-F life-time income method,I proposed a method to estimate the human capital of rural middle school students.Combined with the probability of middle school students who are accurate to the school level to enter the general high school and secondary vocational education,as well as the data of college and middle school enrollment rate of county and district general high school graduates,I calculates the human capital of middle school students in each school.I used Oaxaca-blinder mean decomposition theory to analyze the factors that caused human capital differences in different regions,such as enrollment rate,local labor market education return rate and experience return rate,and the external impact of local human capital level.The third chapter describes the current situation of rural middle school students' human capital,and finds that students' expected lifetime income will increase with their education level's increase.Promoting rural middle school students' human capital investment is conducive to the realization of poverty alleviation of rural families.Thus,another deeper problem should be explored,that is,how to guide rural middle school students to invest in human capital,what factors affect rural middle school students' investment in human capital,so the fourth chapter of this paper analyzes rural middle school students' investment choice of human capital.The fourth chapter analyzes the influencing factors of human capital investment choice of rural middle school graduates.First of all,the theory of expected value is introduced into the theoretical model of human capital investment choice of rural middle school graduates,and the individual random utility function of students is proposed.The theoretical model basis of individual human capital investment choice is established with the goal of individual utility maximization.The theoretical model is transformed into the empirical regression method of mixed logic model considering the assumptions and parameters of mixed logic model.In this paper,the corresponding return of expected investment choice is included into the influencing factors for analysis,specifically,the application of human capital and personal choice model.The empirical research on the decision-making of human capital investment of rural middle school graduates is based on the data of China Family Panel Survey and “double teaching program”.The data of China Family Panel Survey belong to the national representative sample sampling survey data.In order to control the impact of students' cognitive ability and the fixed effect of school class level,we can more accurately estimate the impact of expected human capital on students' choice of entering school.In this paper,we use the database of “double teaching program” of local in-depth survey data and the data of China Family Panel Survey to make complementary research.Through descriptive statistical analysis,this paper shows the correlation between the influencing factors and the results of rural middle school students' choice of entering school,and estimates the influence coefficient of the expected time cost corresponding to the human capital investment choice of rural middle school graduates on the middle school students' choice of general high school education and secondary vocational education.The fourth chapter verified the important role of school quality and teachers' teaching quality on students' academic performance achievement and accumulation of human capital,which leads to the next problem: how to improve school quality and teachers' teaching quality.Among many projects that aim at improving the quality of rural middle schools,the new Internet education mode has more advantages in convenience,low cost and continuity.In order to explore whether Internet education can bring changes and influence to rural school education,the fifth chapter analyzes the impact of Internet on rural middle school education.The fifth chapter explored the impact of Internet Education on rural middle school education.First of all,a theoretical model has been put forward to describe the process of Internet education changing the school teaching mode.The conclusion that Internet education has an impact on rural middle school education is drawn through the theoretical model.In order to verify the inference from the model,empirical analysis is needed to support the data.Therefore,this paper introduces the application of Internet education technology,especially analyzes “double teaching program” of Internet Education in detail.Basic difference-indifference model,extended difference-in-difference model and quantile regression models are applied to explore the impact of Internet Education have been used in the empirical analysis of the survey data of Internet education experimental programs,and estimate the impact of Internet education on students,teachers and schools from the four perspectives of overall effect analysis,dynamic effect analysis,channel analysis and quantile regression analysis.The sixth chapter summarizes the whole paper,draws the main conclusions,puts forward policy suggestions,and makes some prospects for the follow-up research.The research conclusions of this paper include the following three aspects: firstly,I founded a method to measure the students' human capital from the perspective of micro rural middle school level,and calculated rural middle school students' human capital in China based on the data of enrollment rate obtained from field survey.According to the measurement results,the paper analyzes the differences of human capital between schools,and finds that there are great differences in the human capital of middle students in different schools.I analyzed the differences between the average level of schools and the province,and found that there was a gap between the average level of human capital of rural middle school students in the province and that of middle school students in the province.School education quality,regional education development level and labor market return were the main factors that caused the human capital gap.Improving the education quality of rural middle schools,improving the education quality of regional senior high school and attaching importance to the protection of local labor market were essential to narrowing middle school students' human capital gap between rural and urban areas.Secondly,the empirical analysis of rural middle schools' students' choice of human capital investment using the mixed logic model finds that the expected return on investment has a significant effect on the choice of rural middle school graduates.With the remaining control variables unchanged,the probability of choosing ordinary senior high school education increases by an average of 0.031% for every 10 thousand yuan increase in the expected lifetime income of choosing ordinary senior high school education,while students' probability of choosing secondary vocational education increases by an average of 0.054% with every 10 thousand yuan increase of expected lifetime income.This also means the influence degree brought by the increase in expected lifetime income corresponding to the choice of secondary vocational education is greater than that of general high school education.The empirical analysis results mean that if the improvement of local education quality has been improved to increase the higher education entrance examination results,rural middle school graduates will be inspired to choose ordinary senior high school;at the same time,if the quality of vocational education has been improved so as to increase education returns,students will also be promoted to choose vocational education.Students' academic performance has a significantly positive impact on students' choice of general high school and secondary vocational education compared with choosing work.The impact of students' academic performance on their choice of general high school is higher than that of secondary vocational education.Thirdly,the theoretical model proved that Internet education can improve the human capital of rural middle school students.The empirical results of the Internet education experiment program showed that the Internet education can significantly improve the students' academic performance in experimental subjects,and the students who participate in the Internet education experiment program receive a significant improvement in their score quantile ranking.The channels of the influence of Internet Education Technology on students' performance include the effect brought by the improvement of teachers' teaching level and the effect produced by students watching videos directly.Teachers' teaching quality improvement through watching videos has a time accumulation effect.Students improve their math scores by about 0.344 standard deviations on average when their watching video time in class increases by one hour,which means a student whose math score is at 50% of the scale increase to about 63.3% on average from the perspective of the score standard normal distribution.Students improves their math scores by about 0.0367 standard deviations on average when their math teachers' watching video time increases by one hour,which means a student whose math score is at 50% of the scale increase to about 51.6% on average from the perspective of the score standard normal distribution.The shortcomings of this paper are as follows:Firstly,the survey data used in this paper is still limited due to the current investigation capacity.The proportion data of middle school students' choice to enter ordinary high school,secondary vocational education and work are used in calculating the human capital of middle school students at school level,However,the data of further choice to enter university,college and work ratio of high school students at school level is lacking,and only the data of university and college enrollment rate of all senior high school students in the county where the middle school is located can be used.In this regard,I will continue to collect additional data in my future research.Secondly,my paper focuses on the research of rural middle school students' cognitive ability,and lacks the research of non-cognitive ability.Compared with test scores,noncognitive ability measurement has a wide range and is difficult to quantify.In the future,I will expand the research on the measurement,formation and influencing factors of rural middle school students' non-cognitive ability.