The Decision-making Of Children's Enrollment On The Rural Compulsory Education

During the recent years, more and more scholars and policy makers pay much attention to the human capital investment. Some empirical studies on the economics growth show education, as an investment which can boost the standard of salary under a normal labor market, is a very effective method to accelerate the rural development and abate the poverty. Although education is very important and we Chinese have already acquired a great accomplishment, there are still a large number of poor populations not getting a satisfactory educational service. The Human Development Report in 1995 evaluated: since the time of 1990s, near 4 million primary and junior high schools students drop out every year. Another data revealed: at the end of 2000, a 15% population regions still have not popularized the compulsory education, in some of those depressed areas, the primary school enrollment is lower than 70% and the proportion to enter junior school from primary school is only 50%. The actuality described above urges us to pay much attention on the rural education, especially the issue of dropout. Two reasons for this attention: first, the employment opportunity for dropouts is less and their salary are lower, going with the social cost increasing; second, without the government intervention, the issue of dropouts in those depressed areas will become more seriously along with time.The decision-making of Children's enrollment is a typical family decision behavior in the economics analysis frame. The research object in our study is the decision-making of child's enrollment on the stage of compulsory education in rural China. The main purposes of this paper are to investigate the characteristic and influence of the decision-making of enrollment in rural areas. Based on the data of the indoor survey from China Center for Agricultural Policy in 2001, we describe the educational expenditure of rural family with statistic analysis and get the determinants of the decision-making of enrollment by an empirical study. Therefore, we draw some conclusions from our research as follows: (1)The children's characteristics are important determinant on the decision-making of their enrollment; (2)The influence of mother's education on the decision-making is larger than that of father;(3)The influence of educational direct cost is statistically significant regard to the decision-making of children's enrollment compared with the opportunity cost; (4)The gender discrimination still exists evidently in the decision-making of children's enrollment.However, because of the limitation of our ability and the number of samples, this study is only our first step research. To learn more about the decision-making of children's enrollment, we'll have to expand our research scope and extend our survey time.