Decision-Making Mechanism Of Studying Abroad At A Young Age Among Middle-Income Families From Perspective Of Behavior Economics

According to the National Bureau of Statistics,Chinese middle-income group,the largest and most growing ones in the world,has shown an increasing demand and comsumption ability of education.Studying abroad has been an important educational option for Chinese middle-income groups’ child and formed a trend among them.The increasing proportion of students studying abroad at middle school indicating their huge personalized education demand for childs.However,since Covid-19 epedemic,studying abroad have almost suspended due to the turbulent international situation and anti-epidemic policies,especially for young students.The news of stranded young students chartering flights back to China make studying abroad at young age questioned.At the National Educational Work Conference in 2021,the Ministry of Education specifically pointed out the necessary of establishing the public policy that does not encourage or advocate studying abroad at young age.Almost at the same time,Ministry of Education also claim to ease the burden of excessive homework and off-campus tutoring for students undergoing compulsory educations,leading to the cancellation of K12 training and closing the channel to high-quality educational resources for middle-income group.The educational environment has undergone great changes at both home and abroad.Will the trend of studying abroad at young age stop?This work is mainly devoted to the causes of studying abroad at young age from the view of both social and families and model the decision-making mechanism of middle-income families,which is of great significance for studying abroad market development,implementation of relevant policies and changes of the global education chains.Firstly,this study analyzes the sociological causes of the trend of studying abroad at a young age from three perspectives including social stratification theory,cross-border cultural capital accumulation and the educational equity,and also discussed the inevitability of the trend of studying abroad at a young age.Second,to quantitatively investigate the middle-income families’ willingness to send children study abroad in epidemic,this work carried out an empirical study from parents’ view with an example of Shanghai.Here,this work compared the differences in the perceptions of different groups of people on the benefits and risks of studying abroad,explaining the willing difference between families.Furthermore,to quantitively analysis the influence of different factors on families’ willingness to studying abroad,this study comprehensively summarizes the factors influence willingness to study abroad from three aspects: behavioral attitude,subjective norms,and intuitive norms based on theory of planned behavior and modelled the statistical influence network between these factors with structural equation.Four,based on prospect theory and behavior experiments,this study discusses how the benefits,risks,losses,and costs of studying abroad ultimately affect family’s willingness to send children abroad.In this work,the theoretical analysis found out following results:First,it’s an inevitable result of unbalanced allocation of high-quality educational resources and the mismatch between the afforablity and limited educational resources.From the view of middle-income groups’ demand of high-quality educational resources,the current policies including “multi-school division” and “K12 double reduction”shutdown the middle-income groups’ access to high-quality educational resources,promting the development of studying abroad.Second,the benefits or risk estimation of studying abroad is totally different between supporters and its oppsitions.For family subgroups divided with annual income,their willingness to study abroad increases with anuual income.And parent’s abroad experience also increases their willingness to send children abroad.Third,families’ willingness to send their children to study abroad was influenced by their affordability and perceived values.The behavioral attitude to study abroad is the positively decisive factors for perceived values.Epidemic risk strongly negative affects families’ perceived values.The restriction of household is another key thrust for families to send child abroad.In addition,as discussed previously,the parent’s abroad experience will promote the perceived values of their children’s studying abroad plan.However,the subjective norms have no significant influence on perceived value of studying abroad.In terms of perceived value of studying abroad,families value the benefit of education most,followed by employment benefits and finally the social reputation benefits,which is consistent with their effective time.It also means families pay more attention to short-term benefits in decision-making.Four,this study found the reference dependence is the key reseaon of different decision of families in the same situation.It also found that the increase of intention to study abroad decrease with family’s budget increasing when the benefits and costs of studying abroad are considered.However,the increase of intention to study abroad increase with family’s budget increasing when the epidemic risk and costs of studying abroad are considered.The S-type value functions could explain these phenomena,indicating the reflexive effect,loss avoidance effect and centainty effect in behavior economics play key role in decision-making of studying abroad.Finally,this study analyzes the appreciation opportunities brought by the industrial transformation in the post-epidemic era for overseas students,risk and losses caused by epidemic.This study predicts that study abroad will continue due to the demand of middle-income group for quality education still exists.Thus,relevant supervision and guarantee mechanisms need to adapt the post-epidemic era to protect the health and safety of overseas students.