Higher Education Cost-sharing Mechanism Is A Comparative Analysis

At present, the focus of most of the people on the higher education cost has been shifted from whether tuition fees should be charged to whether tuition fee prices are too high. From 1999, higher education tuition was rising every year. According to the information from Ministry of Education, the average tuition fee about 5000 yuan in 2000 was fixed in the next few years. There are some questions to be answered:Which one the higher education cost is allocated to, how about the present proportion, whether the proportion is reasonable, and how to improve it if it is unreasonable? And these questions are the background to research the system of higher education cost sharing of China.The higher education costs must be defined before cost proportion research. Considering the existence of the various definitions on the higher education cost, the cost of higher education in a narrow sense, that it is the consuming for college students education, is chosen for the data obtaining and the research in this article. That is the monetary measurement cost without the opportunity cost invested in higher education for the society and individuals. It is neccesary for cost allocation based on cost-sharing theory for the rapid expansion of higher education.The current status of cost sharing of the universities and colleges in China is analyzed including our government, individual families and the society. It is imbalance for government investment, then the tuition fee is a little high for most of families and the ratio is too small for the society. Comparing with the cost sharing system of higher education in USA and India, a conclusion of the reasonable proportion of cost sharing improved comes out.There are three conclusions as follows:the first is the higher education cost is burdened mainly by the government and the individual families. The second is the tuition fee price is too high for those impoverished families whether from the city or the countryside. The last one is the percentage on higher education should be above 50 percent for the government and about 25 to 30 percent for the individual families.There are two main innovations as follows:the first is the necessity, inevitability and inerrancy are confirmed with the application of the cost sharing theory. The second is the empirical analysis was applied for the problem of too high tuition fee price comparing the disposable income of residents with the tuition fees of higher educations.