A Theoretical And Empirical Analysis Of The Influencing Factors Of The Demand For Higher Education In China

Education is a major event in people's livelihood, and higher education is one of the most important. With China's rapid modernization, living standard's improvement, higher education is an important way to meet people's need. The rapid economic globalization, the further establishment of the status of the international manufacturing power, and the further adjustment of industrial structure, give higher education more difficult tasks in the future. With China's rapid economic development in the last ten years, our higher education got rapid progress too. The increase of government's investment in higher education and college enrollment, the emergence of a variety of vocational and technical schools, proves that our higher education is booming. However, in comparison with other countries, our gross enrollment of college, the number of college students per million people and the expected education level of adults are all at a relatively low level. So, what factors influence the demand for higher education? How to improve our national educational level? The study on these issues has great significance to our higher education development.There are totally five parts in this paper. The first part is an introduction to introduce the paper background, the significance of the research and the definition of relative concept in this paper. And then there are the paper structure, the main innovation and inadequate. The second part is a summary of the current literature on the influencing factors of the public goods first and then of higher education. Among them, the influencing factors of higher education demand in current study can be summarized as economic factors and social factors. The third part is a theoretical analysis of the influencing factors of higher education demand. This paper studies from the aspect of the family, and analyze the influence of the family's socio-economic status and family structure on higher education demand. And the influencing mechanism of each factor included in family's socio-economic status and family structure is given. The fourth part is the empirical analysis of the influencing factors of the demand for higher education, using the research data of 15 cities in Shandong province. The regression analysis first gives the regression results to display the influence of each factor on the demand for higher education, and then we use contingent valuation method to get people's average willingness to pay for the improvement of higher education level. Finally, the fifth part is the main conclusions and policy recommendations. Increasing income, decreasing the number of children in each family and so on are the effective ways to improve our national education level. Additionally, we find that most of the people are willing to pay for the improvement of the level of higher education, and this amount of money will be helpful to speed up the process of meeting the great demand for higher education.