An Empirical Study On The Willingness Of Agricultural Major Students At Vocational Colleges To Devote To Agriculture

As the shortage of the talent reserve in agriculture has become increasingly prominent, “who will be engaged in agricultural production” is an urgent problem demanding prompt solution. It is estimated that cultivating agricultural students in vocational colleges is an indispensable method in the reserve of agricultural talents, and they shall play important roles in agriculture in future. Although domestic and foreign scholars have explored a lot on the issue stated above and gained fruitful outcomes, there are some deficiencies in those researches. For instance, these studies are mainly theoretical-oriented ones focusing on the factors relating with career choices among vocational college students, while there is few empirical study on the career intentions of agricultural students in vocational colleges. Therefore, studying the students’ intention in becoming professional farmers is of profound theoretical and practical significance.The research object of this paper is the occupational intention of agricultural students in vocational colleges. There are three research purposes: first, enquiring into the vocational agricultural student’s willingness to become professional farmers; second, determining the factor elements(both in objective and subjective, internal and external) which may influence the student’s career intentions; third, based on the previous two research purposes, figuring out corresponding and feasible guidance mechanisms to encourage more student to be more willing to engage in agriculture in the future.In terms of research methodology, this study mainly adopted the method of questionnaire investigation, in-depth interview and literature study. Through adopting stratified randomized cluster sampling method, the author chose two agricultural vocational colleges in Jiangxi Province as field work sites. Besides, the sampling frame covers plant protection, animal husbandry, aquaculture, Chinese herbal medicine cultivation, garden and other agricultural majors. Finally, 400 questionnaires were completed and 347 of them are valid, also, five in-depth interviews among teachers and students were conducted during the pilot study.The research routine of this paper is as follows: First, based on the rational person hypothesis under the complete information, this paper constructs the “Rational Choice Framework” for agricultural students in becoming professional farmers, in accordance with which, this paper put forward a series of hypotheses. Second, in order to verify those hypotheses, this paper set dependent variable and independent variables, control variables, in the meantime, interview outline questionnaire were designed accordingly. Third, this paper analyzed the current agricultural student’s intention in becoming professional farmers based on the data collected by interviews and questionnaires; then a nested multi-level logit regression model was used to verify the research hypothesis. Finally, it is the result and discussion.The main findings are as follows: The nested multi-level logit regression model found that six variables have significant effects on agricultural vocational students’ occupational intention, i.e., father’s occupation, students’ internship experience, students’ professional interest, the prospect of agricultural working, governmental funding policies for agricultural students. Guided by the results of quantitative analysis, this paper discussed the mechanisms of how those six variables influence the students’ occupational intention.Respecting the above-mentioned research findings, this paper makes the following proposals: firstly, widening the range of the free-charge policy, which means it should cover agricultural students in vocational colleges, not only among those in middle school. Second, optimizing the agricultural subsidy policy. In addition, strengthening the quality of the practical education and training program for the agricultural students in vocational colleges. Last but not least, using mass media to produce a favorable social environment for the agriculture-related jobs.