On The Dai Middle School Students' Personal Demand For Higher Education

Personal demand for higher education is of vital importance to the development of higher education. By using the middle school students of four nationalities -- the Dais, Hans, Hanis and Jingpos as research samples, the essay analyzes, in the ways of descriptive statistic and logistic regression, the relationship between the under-developing higher education situation of the Dais and the Dai middle school students' demand for higher education from four perspectives: willingness to accept higher education, ability to pay for higher education, study performance and opportunity to higher education. The results show that although the Dai middle school students' ability to pay for higher education is higher than the other three nationalities', their willingness to accept higher education, study performance and higher educational opportunities are significantly lower than the Hans, whose higher education development is higher than that of the Dais. But when the varieties, such as student's family backgrounds, personal features, economic status and some educational and cultural factors are under controls, there are no significant differences between the four nationalities' demands for higher education. When analyzing the causes, it has been found that the Dai students' religious belief, grade, study performance, values on education, status of family labor forces, family income and the opportunity cost have significant influence on their willingness to go to higher schools. And the ability to pay for higher education is due much to their family surroundings and status of family labor forces. The reasons why they don't perform well in their study could be interpreted, to some extent, as lacking positive experiences in study, the higher grade, and the worse study performance. Also religious belief has passive influence on the students' study performance. Study performances, valuation on education, opportunity cost, mother's occupation and the attentions of the relatives have significant influence on the students' opportunities to go to higher schools. Based on the practical research, the essay comes to the conclusion that the most important factors which have influence on the Dai middle school students' demand for higher education are not economic status, but their cultural characteristics, educational quality, product model and so on. The way to improve the Dai middle school students' demand for higher education should, first of all, be to reconstruct their cultural model, economic development model and to improve their education quality and so on.