Institutional Change Of China's Degree System From The Perspective Of New Institutionalism

Degree system includes degree,standard of degree coferring,degree quality assurance system and degree authorization system,which is an important part of higher education system.Under the background of higher education reform,it is of theoretical and practical significance to re-examine the changing logic of China's degree system.Based on new institutional economics,new institutional politics and new institutional sociology,this paper constructs a comprehensive analytical framework to research the changing path,explore the changing logic and analyse the causes and constraints,trying to predict the future trend of China's degree system.Using historical institutionalism and bibliometrics,this paper studies the changing track of China's degree system.The analytical paradigm of historical institutionalism can be summarized as “history” and “structure”.Firstly,from the perspective of history,it is found that compulsory institutional change predominates the institutional evolution,supplemented by induced institutional change.Mutations and gradual changes can both be observed,while key nodes and threshold effects mingled with them.When mutation is completed,the threshold effect becomes dominant,presenting the characteristic of gradual change.Secondly,from the perspective of structure,after analyzing the relationship between the subjects of China's degree system,the subjects can be divided into government,degree-conferring units and social forces.The power structure of tripartite subjects is asymmetric,while the government occupies the main position,degree-conferring units positively respond and social forces slightly participate.Thirdly,analyzing from perspectives of history and structure,it is considered that under the influence of learning effect,collaboration effect and adaptive expectation,the compulsory change of “government-led” has already formed path dependence.If we want to weaken the path dependence effect,we must make use of key nodes and threshold critical point of the change.Meanwhile,by applying co-word analysis and clustering analysis,this paper makes a quantitative analysis of China's degree policy texts from January 1980 to August 2019.With the help of Pajek software,the hot spots and changing path of China's degree system are visualized.Two conclusions can be drawn.Firstly,“degree”,“professional degree”,“degree authorization”,“postgraduate education”,“Sino-foreign cooperation in running schools” and “overseas students” are important parts of China's degree policy.Secondly,two obvious paths can be observed,one path is that China's degree system has gradually changed from “science priority” to“science and profession coexistence”,the other path is from “domestic recognition”develops to “international recognition”.This paper probes into the causes of the change of China's degree system from three aspects,which are economic growth,technical advancement and educational development.By calculating contribution of various types of education to economic growth from 1993 to2017,it is found that vocational education also plays an important role in economic growth.Therefore,degree system should cover all levels of higher vocational education.College students have the need to be respected and to realize their self-worth,people have the need for lifelong learning,diversified needs put new requirements on degree system.Combining with the need of technical advancement,the construction of modern vocational education system,“double first-class initiative” and learning society,this paper analyses the reasons for the change of China's degree system.Integrating theories of new institutional economics,new institutional politics and new institutional sociology,this paper figures out that institutional cost,legal basis,cultural concepts and leader's preferences are the key factors restricting the effective supply of China's degree system.Institutional cost will affect the efficiency of institutional change.If the cost is excessive,the government would choose to maintain the degree system and degree-conferring units would participate in the change passively.The role of legal factors is fundamental,so the incompleteness of degree law will increase the uncertainty of the change.Backward ideology will increase the friction of the change.Centralized planning thought would restrict the flexibility of the change.The thought of emphasizing science over vocational skills lead to path dependence.The culture of acquaintance increases the transaction cost of the change.Political leaders' s preference influences the priority and efficiency of the institutional change.Compulsive homogeneity,imitative homogeneity and normative homogeneity help the degree system of western countries gradually form their own characteristics in the process of institutional change.Diversity and innovation are the inevitable results of institutional change,which is the basis of the belif that degree system with Chinese characteristics is the logical destination of China's institutional change.Degree system is the result of value choice.China's degree system should make the right chioce of value.It should integrate humanistic value and instrumental value,integrate localization and internationalization.It should base itself on China's national conditions and take root in China's reality.Compared with Western countries,China has similarities in economic factors and higher education development.There are also great differences in political system and cultural concepts.Based on China's national conditions,we can choose to learn advanced concepts and successful practices of foreign degree system.Therefore,the instutional change can get closer and closer to the need of society.The content of China's degree system would be more and more in line with the actual needsof people.In this way,Chinese characteristics can be obtained.Setting up a degree for college students,increasing types of bachelor's degree,improving quality assurance system for training top innovative talents,building channels of transformation between different types of education,and establishing mechanism between degree and vocational qualification certificate would be the trend of institutional change.In order to speed up construction of degree system with Chinese characteristics,we should make full use of synergy effect and share cost together.We should improve the law of degree.We should also guide the regeneration of ideas and enhance the confidence of culture,taking advantage of informal system in the process of institutional change.The innovations of this study are as follows.Firstly,it chooses a new research perspective.This paper studies the emergence,development and trend of China's degree system from the perspective of institutional change.Following the theoretical approach of institutional change,this study analyzes the dynamic process of the development and change of China's degree system.It explores compulsory changes and induced changes,analyzes structural relationship of institutional subjects,and discussed how to change from old degree system to new degree system.Secondly,it adopts a new analytical model and combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis.Based on new institutional economics,new institutional politics and new institutional sociology,this paper constructed a comprehensive analytical framework.Making comprehensive use of new institutional theory and bibliometrics,this paper probes into the inevitability and restrictive factors of change of China's degree system and predicts possible trend of the change in the future.Thirdly,it puts forward new theoretical points.The first one is,unlike spontaneous evolution of western degree system,the government-led compulsory institutional change runs through the whole process of China's degree system.The second one is,under certain conditions,the efficiency of compulsory change is better than induced change.The third one is,degree system with Chinese characteristics is the logical destination of institutional change.We should extract Chinese characteristics from the common external form,and realize the leap from China's degree system to the degree system with Chinese characteristics.