On Rent-seeking In Education

There have been many appearances such as choosing schools-, buying and selling the diploma, charging in disorder etc. in education of our country in recent years. These appearances disturb the regular order of education and bring about the bad influences for the society, so we must try our best to stop them at once. However, the theorists of China explore and analyze these appearances mainly from the perspectives of value orientation, ethics and ideology, which reveals the producing reason of these appearances in some extent, but can not touch the essence. In fact, from the view of economics, these appearances are activities of educational rent-seeking, they are a kind of economical activities on the base of the person' s motive of profit-seeking. Therefore, it can reveal the essence of these appearances deeper to analyze them from the view of economics. For this reason, the writer tries to explore these appearances systematically from a new perspective by taking the thoughts and methods in the rent-seeking theory of the west new institutional economics. The author wants to offer a basic study frame for the research of educational rent-seeking on one side;and provide some suggests to prevent the activities of rent-seeking in Chinese education on the other side. The thesis can be divided into four parts:In part one, on the base of introducing the concept of rent-seeking in economics, the thesis defines the connotation and the extension of educational rent-seeking, after this, it expound the essential factors of educational rent-seeking. The educational rent-seeking refers to all kinds of rent-seeking behaviors in education, the study object of the article is the rent-seeking behaviors among the governments, schools and persons. The educational rent-seeking activity is composed by the rent-seeking subject, the rent-seeking behavior and the institutional environment of rent-seeking. It has the characteristic of universality, concealment, spontaneity and harmfulness.In part two, the thesis expounds the manifestation and the harmfulness of educational rent-seeking concretely. The manifestation of educationalrent-seeking is different, which can roughly be divided into two categories ?the rent-seeking by power and the rent-seeking by institution, the appearances of charging in disorder, choosing schools, buying and selling the diploma are all manifestation of the rent-seeking by power;The educational rent-seeking activities under the institution of two tracks and the activities under the institution of recruiting students and obtaining employment in universities are the manifestation of rent-seeking by institution. The harmfulness of educational rent-seeking is huge, which increases the transaction cost of education, distorts the resources arrangement of education, makes the educational unfairness more, brings about all kinds of educational degeneration and hinders the reform and the development of education.In part three, it analyzes the producing source of educational rent-seeking. The excessive intervenient of the government, the unclear educational property rights, the non-symmetric educational information and the unperfect institutions of educational administration are all the factors which cause the educational rent-seeking.In part four, it provides the suggests to restrain the activities ofrent-seeking. Including: 1, reduce the direct intervenient of government, open the education market;2, Establish the institutions of property rights and make the educational property rights clearer;3, Make the work of schools known to public, promote the transparency of educational information; 4, accelerate the construction of legal system of education, bring forth new ideas to the institutions of educational administration and make them perfect.