On Multi-funding For Education

Education funding is a significant problem. The current funding system of education in China, based on three main bodies including governments, enterprises and individuals, is designed with the emphasis of the roles of government mechanism and market mechanism in education funding. However, the political and economic system reform with the target of "small government and great society" results in a rapid growth of the Third Sector, and the current social structure is changing without being noticed. Obviously the current education funding system cannot adapt to this change. At the same time, according to relative researches, as scholars are always limited to the argument that education funding is not government-dominated but market-dominated, there is an urgent need of introducing new theories to education funding. Therefore, this dissertation reanalyzes the multi-funding system for education based on the traditional theory of human capital and public goods and by inducing the theory of the Third Sector, as well as comparative researches on the education funding system between China and foreign countries. The dissertation points out the limitations of China's current education funding system, and puts forward intensively the goals, principles and measures of reforming the education funding system.The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part, that is, Chapter One, mainly includes the problems to be researched into, reorganizing the literatures about education funding, and pointing out the major approaches and methods of research in this dissertation.The second part includes Chapter Two and Three, mainly introducing the theory of the Third Sector, and reanalyzing the multi-funding system of education. Chapter Two mainly analyzes the three-dimension structure of modern society, that is, "government, enterprise and the Third Sector" from the respective of the theory of the Third Sector. Generally speaking, enterprises provide with private goods, government provides with monopolistic public goods and the Third Sector voluntarily with non-monopolistic public goods or quasi-public goods. The three sides should proportionally play their respective roles in providing public goods and service for the public, and establish the competitive and vigorous public service system. Chapter Three reconsiders the multi-funding system of education from the three-dimension respective of "government, enterprise and voluntary" by integrating the theories of human capital, public goods and the Third Sector. The funding bodies for education should be government, enterprise and the Third Sector, and the operation mechanisms of each body consist of government mechanism, market mechanism and voluntary mechanism. Though each body has its own optimal operation mechanism, the three operation mechanisms are usually "mixedly" used by each body due to the cooperation of the three bodies, in order to take advantage of the "integration" of multi-financing system of education.The third part includes Chapter Four, Five and Six, mainly comparing with the education funding systems between China and foreign countries, analyzing the current situations of China's multi-funding system of education, and questing for the measures to optimize China's multi-funding system of education.Chapter Four, by comparing the evolution process of education funding system between America, England, France, Japan and China, finds out that though government is the most important funding body of education in developed countries, the other funding bodies also play a great role in their own field, especially the Third Sector plays an indispensable role in developed countries by running non-profitable private education, donating money, earning money by itself and playing as intermediary of education funding, etc. However, the Third Sector in China is still at its early stage, and enterprises lack incentives of funding for education, universities poor at money earning. Therefore, as the current education funds mainly come from financial input and tuition, government mechanism and market mechanism are mostly taken in financing for education, while voluntary mechanism is seldom adopted.Chapter Five puts forward a general theory model of multi-funding for all levels of education according to the public attribute of each level and the experiences of developed countries. Then it analyzes the present situation of China's multi-funding system of education, and finds out such common problems that investment of government is too low, the responsibility of funding for education is unclear among the different levels of governments, individual overburdens for education, and enterprises and the Third Sector both take insufficiently part in education funding. Therefore the source of China's education funding problems is "institution disorder", and there exists "offsideness" or "absence" of each body in undertaking the responsibility of education funding.Chapter Six mainly discusses about how to rectify the "institution disorder" problem of China's multi-funding system of education through reforms. It points out that ultimate goal of the reforms is to raise sufficient funds for education, and the basic approach is to standardize the conducts of all bodies, in order to make them cooperate or substitute each other, establish a healthy and cooperative relationship with each other, and realize the "homing" or "filling the vacancy" of funding bodies. Finally this chapter put forwards some measures to optimize China's multi-funding system of education.