The Research On Market Structure Of Online Higher Education Services Industry

Generally speaking, higher education resources in China are relatively in short supply. It has entered into the popularization stage, but the level is not very high. Higher.education developing road has a long way to go. Online higher education is an emerging higher education form, and is an important complement of higher education. Its emergence, to some extent, meets citizens'need for higher education. Particularly, it can meet the need of workers who can't complete full-time study. Also, it advances the developing pace of higher education and contributes to social education equity.However, online education is different from full-time higher education. It takes advantage of the huge network of Internet as its infrastructure of social education. Taking regional conditions into consideration, online education can supply educational products and services with ease and target. The online education of each area will be different on the aspect of education models and results due to several reasons. And these differences all have a certain relationship with the market condition and the market structure. In that case, considering from the aspect of demand and also combined with the development process of Chinese online education, this paper makes researches on the structure of online education services market. It will be a new research area of higher education development.Based on the principles of economics, this thesis makes a comprehensive analysis of the status and market structure of online higher education services industry. And also this thesis gives some advices on the optimization of market structure of online higher education services industry and makes some innovation on the aspect of the research of online higher education within the area of Chinese education economics and management. This thesis is separated into six parts.The first part reviews Chinese and foreign scholars' study on the online education market, educational services. We found that Chinese and foreign scholars'research methods differ from each other. Western scholars prefer to quantitative analysis, case studies and normative economic analysis, otherwise Chinese scholars tend to take qualitative research methods. That may be just because of the fact that the developing period of online education in China is short and the theory is not mature enough.In the second part, in order to avoid concept confusion to the following analysis, first concepts are defined. Then this part makes a brief introduction of the basic theory-- market structure theory. According to Mrs. Robinson's and Chamberlain's dividing methods of the market structure type, this article will divide market structure into four basic types, perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly. The typical characteristics of each type have also been summarized for the following qualitative analysis as a reference.Part three first reviews the profiles of the development of Chinese higher education service industry, and then higher education service industry is described from the aspect of the number of institutions, the number of learners and the market scale. And then this part summarizes the development of existing industries mode. At the end of this part the characteristics of online higher education services industry's development is summarized.The fourth part takes Western Industrial Organization theory as the research judging standard and will take advantage of three important factors of market structure research, market concentration, product differentiation, entry barriers to analyze online higher education service industry's market structure. This thesis will take advantage of absolute concentration index (CR) and the Herfindahl index (HHI) to make research on market concentration. And with reference to Bain, Masu Uekusa and Japan Fair Trade Commission's market structure dividing standard, this thesis makes a conclusion that the online higher education services industry in China shows a feature of high or medium oligopolistic. In addition, as for the analysis of product differentiation this part makes analysis from the aspects of the host institutions of the regional differences, differences in school learning centers'location, the differences of prestige between higher education institutions. In the study of entry barriers, this part makes analysis from the policy barriers, barriers of scale, initial capital barriers, technical barriers of the extant firms'advantages and the factors that prohibit potential entrants from coming into the market.According to the conclusion of the fourth part, part five assumes an overall goal of market structure's optimization which is directly combined with the issues which are related to market structure. Then according to the overall goal, this part raises several suggestions and measures from the aspects of market concentration, product differentiation and entry barriers, and also combined with the industry status.Part six shows the conclusion of this thesis. In this section, having taken the above analysis results into consideration, this thesis gives a qualitative evaluation of Chinese online higher education services industry's market structure and gives a demonstration of research methods and research clue. Then this thesis gives an outlook of further research according to the research conclusion and analyzing methods. At last, it is the limitation which is contained in this thesis.