Research On Market Demand Of Higher Education And Training Industry Under Digitalization

In recent years,the profitable online education and training industry has developed rapidly in China.However,behind the rapid growth of its market size,Chinese online education and training industry also has many problems.Single marketing channel,low teaching quality,information asymmetry between producers and consumers,etc.,have jointly led to the low network traffic conversion rate,low renewal rate low referral rate,and,therefore,high customer acquisition cost of online education and training companies.Those problems will stunt the high-quality and healthy development of Chinese online education and training industry in the post-pandemic era.For now,paid education and training has become an important way for Chinese residents to invest in human capital,so it has a positive externalities of improving the quality of labor force.What’s more,without space restrictions and with high flexibility,online education and training is considered to be able to reduce the uneven distribution of out-of-school education resources in different regions.and it may become the main way for employee learners to realize continuing education and lifelong learning in the future.Therefore,exploring the cause for the various practical problems faced by Chinese online education and training industry from the perspective of economics and management in order to provide a reference for companies and the government to work together to achieve high-quality and heathy development of Chinese online education and training industry has important practical significance.This research first uses the theories of industrial economics,consumer behavior and pedagogy to theoretically analyze the new characteristics of the online education and training industry compared with the traditional offline training industry from the perspectives of supply and demand respectively.Then,based on a set of choice experiment questionnaire survey data of college students with a demand for paid education and training in a 211 college in Nanjing,using the mixed Logit model,some theoretical analysis results were empirically tested from the perspective of consumer preference.To be specific,This paper explores consumers’ preferences for choice between online training courses and offline training courses and its influencing factors,and uses channels with different credibility as proxy variables for the degree of consumers’ subjectively perceived information asymmetry to study the influence of information asymmetry on consumers’ willingness to pay(WTP)for education and training.The main research results are as follows:First,Internet technology and online education models have profoundly changed the production mode and consumer demand characteristics of the online education and training industry.In terms of supply,compared with the traditional offline education and training industry,the online education and training industry has new features such as significant economies of scale and scope,and unprecedented increase in labor productivity.In terms of demand,although compared to traditional offline training,Online education training has the advantages of saving transportation costs and time costs,but its inherent defects such as lack of classroom teaching atmosphere,difficulty in supervising students,and inconvenient communication between teachers and students may have a negative impact on its training effect,thereby reducing consumers’ evaluation.In addition,my country’s online education and training industry may be facing serious information asymmetry problems.Secondly,when the training content and other quality attributes are the same,the willingness of the interviewed students to pay for two kinds of online courses is significantly lower than the offline small-class courses.The average WTP gap of interviewed students between the recorded video courses and offline small-class courses is about 31 yuan/class hour,which is roughly equivalent to their WTP for the two quality attributes of "teachers’ level" and "with or without teaching assistants".The average WTP gap of interviewed students between online live small-class courses and offline small-class courses is about 22 yuan/class hour,which is roughly equivalent to their WTP for the two quality attributes of "supporting textbooks" and "refund services".Thirdly,personal characteristics and family background of interviewed students will significantly affect their choice preference between online training and offline training.When other quality attributes and price levels are the same and other personal characteristics and family background variables also remain unchanged,the stronger the self-learning ability of interviewed students,the higher their preference for online training;the higher the average education level of parents of interviewed students,the higher their preference for offline training;the higher the monthly household income of interviewed students,the higher their preference for online training.Fourthly,the increase in the degree of interviewed students’ subjectively perceived information asymmetry will significantly reduce their WTP for training courses.Compared with offline training,the degree of interviewed students’ subjectively perceived information asymmetry has a greater impact on their WTP for online training.Besides,the increase in the degree of interviewed students’ subjectively perceived information asymmetry will significantly reduce their WTP for teachers’ level,which is an important quality attribute easy to "adulterate".This result shows that in the opinion of interviewed students,moral hazard has already become very serious in Chinese education and training market.This opinion of consumers is likely to further lead to the adverse selection problem and stunt the high-quality development of Chinese education and training industry.