Major Inputs and Employment of Students in Higher Vocational Colleges---Impacts of Teachers, Curricula and College-Enterprise Collaboration

After decades of development since 1978, higher vocational education in China gradually shifts from scales and quantity expansion to internal efficiency construction. More attention is devoted to its quality and relevancy. How to improve the quality of higher vocational education and the employment of its graduates, given the current school resources, is the key concern today. Focusing on a special field of study in vocational education, this research examines the efficiency of training human resources from the micro level. It has important practical significance too. The main research questions include:;(I) In the sampled field of vocational study under this research, what are the impacts of the various inputs in curricula, teachers and college-enterprise collaborations on the employment rate of the students, general and in matched field of work?;(II) In the sampled field of vocational study, what is the difference in educational production efficiency among the different types of higher vocational colleges, public and private, model and non-model?;(III) What is the influence of economic characteristics among the different provinces on the production efficiency of the sampled field of vocational study?;This research uses the data extracted from the "National Data Collection Platform for Higher Vocational Institutes" of the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2009. It applies the methods of Stochastic Frontier Analysis and Hierarchical Liner Model for an inputs-output analysis. It focuses on a sample of 1226 programmes in the manufacture field of vocational studies offered by various colleges in different provinces. The main conclusions are:;(1) Overall, all the three major inputs, namely the proportion of specialized teachers in the vocational field, the proportion of these specialized teachers with a Master degree or above, the proportion of practice courses to total course requirement, and the enterprise support factor (reflecting the level of college-enterprise collaboration) have a significant and positive impact on the employment rate, general and matched, of graduates in the manufacturing field of vocational studies. The proportion of students taking internships (indicating degree of internship arrangement) is positively and significantly related to the general employment rate, but shows a significant and negative relationship with the matched-employment rate. This respectively reflects two different effects of internship: promoting general employability and increasing job competition. The proportion of excellent courses to total number of courses offered has no deterministic or significant effect on the employment efficiency of the programme. It seems to have only served a signal function in promoting the image of the programme.;(2) The production efficiencies among the different types of vocational colleges are significantly different and hierarchical. Overall, the production efficiency in the private, non-model vocational colleges is lower than the public, provincial / state-level model vocational colleges. However, in the private colleges, the inputs related to specialized teachers have greatest significant impacts and the effect is the strongest. In the public colleges, the inputs related to curricula show higher and significant influence instead, but the effect is relatively weak. It is probably due to the lack of resource there and they are still in their early stage of development and expansion. The public and modeling colleges are generally supposed to be operating in the high-inputs-high-outputs mode. They need to focus largely on the enhancement of internal operational efficiency in optimizing the production process rather than further expansion.;(3) The average employment rates of graduates from the manufacturing field of study are significantly different at the provincial level. They are positively correlated to the GDP per capita in local regions. Moreover, the matched-employment rate shows a significant and negative correlation with increase in the proportion of contribution to GDP by the second-industrial-sector. Presumably this is caused by the consideration of cost savings and the upgrading of the industrial structure, increasing the demand for more highly skilled labors. In the provinces with higher contribution from the third-industrial-sector, the general employment rate is high for the manufacturing field graduates. It reflects to some extent that the manufacturing sector in China is shifting from the primitive labor-intensive operation mode towards the more knowledge-intensive mode, thus setting a higher demand for human resource trained in the more advanced manufacture field of studies.;Based on above results, the study suggests that the government and vocational colleges should strengthen the development of specialized teachers, improve the relevancy of higher vocational courses, and deepen the level and intensity of college-enterprise collaboration. There should be an assurance mechanism for investment of resources in the private and non-model colleges. In addition, the content of curricula and teaching should be adjusted and updated to adapt to the dynamic adjustment of industrial structure, better serving the local economic development, and ultimately improving the employment quality of higher vocational education graduates. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).