Education Policy,Industrial Structure And The Secondary Vocational Education

Since the reform and opening up,the development of secondary vocational education in China has experienced two low tides of enrollment,the first after 1998 and the second after 2011.Most of the existing studies attribute the reasons to secondary vocational education itself,such as unreasonable specialty setting,outdated curriculum system and low matching with employment.However,after the first low tide of enrollment,the enrollment expansion policy of secondary vocational education,has achieved remarkable results for three consecutive years from 2005 to2007.Only from secondary vocational education itself,it can not explain the success of enrollment expansion at this stage.Interestingly,after the second low tide of enrollment,the government also introduced a series of stronger stable enrollment policies,such as tuition free and providing awards and grants,but their effects are very different,and the number of enrollment has decreased year after year.In 2019,the government work report once again proposed the goal of expanding the enrollment of vocational education by one million.Some regions issued some radical policies because it was difficult to complete the enrollment task,which attracted extensive attention from all walks of life.Based on the theoretical perspective of optimal human capital structure,this paper will study the difficulties faced by China’s vocational education from the two dimensions of supply and demand,and explore the direction of China’s secondary vocational education reform in the future.This paper is divided into three parts.The first part is the research basis,which provides the necessary factual basis and theoretical support for in-depth research.The second part is the research subject,which analyzes the impact of education policy and industrial structure on the choice of secondary vocational education,and explores how the policy environment and market demand affect the accumulation of human capital.The third part is the research expansion.Combined with the important influence of education policy and the important role of industrial development,it discusses the path choice of the development of secondary vocational education in China and puts forward relevant policy suggestions.The main contents of this paper are as follows:The first chapter is the introduction,which summarizes the research background,significance and innovation of this paper.Under the research paradigm of neoclassical economics,the research on human capital theory has formed a relatively perfect system,which has a strong explanatory power to explain the reasons for the rapid economic growth of some western countries after World War II.However,with the development of developing countries,some countries with better human capital accumulation fall into the "middle-income trap",and their explanatory power is challenged.Therefore,the optimal human capital structure theory of new structural economics represented by Lin Yifu came into being.However,there are few studies based on the optimal human capital theory,whether it is the basic theory or practical application.There is little literature to bring supply and demand into the analysis framework of the optimal human capital structure at the same time.The empirical research based on the optimal human capital structure theory is even fewer,which needs to be gradually enriched and improved.Among them,special attention should be paid to the relative lack of research on the relationship between industrial structure and human capital structure from the demand side,and the lack of theoretical support and empirical evidence on the causes of the plight of secondary vocational education.The second chapter describes the typical facts of education policy,industrial structure and secondary vocational education.First,by combing the typical facts of China’s industrial structure,employment structure and secondary vocational education,based on the comparative advantage theory of new structural economics and the optimal human capital structure theory,the change process of secondary vocational education in New China is divided into three stages: government led,government led,market led,market driven and government led.Second,as China’s tertiary industry has become the largest industry in the national economy,the inconsistency between secondary vocational education and industrial demand has become increasingly prominent,and industrial transformation and upgrading have occurred simultaneously with the plight of secondary vocational education.Third,when the secondary and tertiary industries become the most important employment sectors in China,the demand for medium skilled labor in the labor market has decreased significantly,and the type structure of secondary vocational education is unbalanced.The third chapter analyzes the influence mechanism of educational policy and industrial structure on secondary vocational education by using the theory of optimal human capital structure.The results show that: first,on the premise of given social environment,workers are willing to accept secondary vocational education only when the present value of lifelong income from secondary vocational education is greater than that without secondary vocational education.In a two-stage training model,the condition for employees to voluntarily pay the training cost is that the investment in the first stage of vocational training is equal to the present value of the marginal output value of employees in the second stage,and the condition for enterprises to be willing to pay the training cost is that the salary paid by enterprises to employees is just equal to the marginal output value of investment training.Second,the change of industrial structure affects the demand structure of human capital through material capital investment.With the continuous transformation and upgrading of the industry,compared with the high skilled and low skilled labor force,the demand for medium skilled labor force in the labor market decreases,and the decline in the demand for medium skilled labor force will lead to more families reducing the demand for secondary vocational education.Third,when the industrial structure and human capital structure achieve the optimal match at every moment,human capital can obtain the highest return.The fourth chapter uses micro individual data and based on the double difference strategy to investigate the impact of the most important secondary vocational education policy since the founding of new China-the cancellation of the "all inclusive and all subcontracting" policy on the choice of secondary vocational education.Through the research,it is found that the cancellation of the "all contracting and all subcontracting" policy significantly reduces the probability of school-age personnel choosing secondary vocational education after graduating from junior middle school,and the reasons for this result are analyzed.It is worth noting that after the implementation of the policy,the probability of female school-age personnel choosing secondary vocational education decreased more than male school-age personnel;The probability of urban school-age personnel choosing secondary vocational education decreased more than that of rural school-age personnel.The fifth chapter studies the impact of industrial structure on secondary vocational education.On the whole,the change of industrial structure has a negative impact on the demand for secondary vocational education.After the financial crisis,China’s economic growth began to slow down,and the adjustment of industrial structure forced the change of human capital demand,which led to a sharp decline in the enrollment of secondary vocational education after 2011.It should be noted that due to the imbalance of regional development in China’s industrial development,there are certain differences in the impact of industrial structure on the enrollment ratio of secondary vocational education in the East,middle and West.For regions with slow expected income growth,the impact is more significant.With the differences in the development level of three industries in each province,the impact also shows corresponding changes,which provides further empirical evidence for the impact of industrial structure on the choice of secondary vocational education.The sixth chapter analyzes the type differences of vocational education returns based on the adult questionnaire data of China labor force dynamic survey(CLDs).The study found that after taking into account the years of education,local identity,employment industry and other factors,vocational training can effectively help the labor force with the highest education level of high school(including ordinary high school and secondary vocational education)to improve the income level.An important policy implication of this paper is that in the future,China will realize the transfer of rural surplus labor force through vigorously developing vocational education,so as to continuously optimize the human capital structure and boost industrial transformation and upgrading.However,we should avoid transferring the rural surplus labor force by implementing the "equalitarianism" of reaching the standard of the general job ratio at the time of the diversion of junior middle school graduates.A better choice is to strengthen the vocational training of senior high school graduates in the areas where the general job ratio does not meet the standard,which has important practical significance for the voluntary transfer of rural surplus labor force to industry according to the market law.Through the above research,the main conclusions of this paper are as follows:first,from the theoretical level,the optimal human capital structure theory has a strong explanatory power to the development of China’s secondary vocational education.Second,from the practical level,there is a close relationship between the industrial structure,employment structure and the development of secondary vocational education,and the three show a coordinated development trend.Third,from the supply side perspective,in the short term,the cancellation of the "all contracting and all subcontracting" policy will reduce the selection probability of secondary vocational education and lead to the first low tide in the development of secondary vocational education,which shows that the education policy has a significant impact on the accumulation of human capital.Fourth,from the perspective of demand side,in the long run,the change of industrial structure will reduce the probability of choosing secondary vocational education.The regions with secondary industry agglomeration are more willing to choose secondary vocational education.Industrial structure plays an important role in human capital accumulation.Finally,from the perspective of the combination of supply and demand,vocational training is the best choice for the labor force whose highest education is high school education.Paying equal attention to vocational education and vocational training is an effective way to promote the development of secondary vocational education in China.The innovation of this study is reflected in the following aspects: first,it uses the optimal human capital structure theory to analyze the problem of secondary vocational education earlier;Second,it systematically explains the causes of the plight of the development of secondary vocational education in China;Third,it compares the possible paths of developing secondary vocational education in China and gives the corresponding policy suggestions.