| Secondary Vocational Education (SVE) is the foundation of Chinese vocationaleducation system as well as an important part of senior secondary education. As aprimary mean to foster elementary technicians, an urgent need to solve the problemsfacing agriculture, rural areas and farmers along with the inevitable demand ofuniversal senior secondary education, central government has paid great attention tothe development of SVE and has implemented series of policies since1978. Thus,SVE in China is better developed in this period. However, it is in the late1990ththatSVE was embarrassed with the dropping social stigma and decreasing enrollment asthe consequence from the shortage financial appropriation, rapid expansion of highereducation, poor employment conditions and low education quality. To get out of thedoldrums, central government has introduced a set of fiscal policies aimed atimproving the attractiveness of SVE since2006. For instance, each rural SVE studentmay be annually funded of1500RMB, those who from poor families and major inagriculture-related subjects can also enjoy a tuition waiver. Moreover, it is declaredthat enrollment of Secondary General Education (SGE) should roughly equal to thatof SVE once policies above are well implemented. Although the population of SVEnow is rebounding, it is still not promising in view of junior high school students’apathetic attitude to SVE. In this case, the biggest worry of SVE now is how toimprove the attractiveness of SVE with policies and then turn the tough recruitmentaround.This paper analyzes empirically the intention of Chinese rural students for the SVEand its determinants based on the survey data of Zhejiang, Anhui and Shanxiprovinces collected in2010. Particular concern is whether the financial aid couldpromote the attractiveness of SVE and cost sharing of rural family. In the process ofsolving these issues, we try to assess the effectiveness of financial policies introducedafter2005from both perspectives of equity and efficiency.We drew the following conclusions, including:(1) Since the reform and opening-up,financial policies of SVE seem to be of high volatility and discontinuity;(2) Chineserural students nowadays have a strong tendency to accept the Secondary GeneralEducation (SGE), but their intention for SVE is relatively low;(3) A list of variablesis found to influence junior high school students’ intention in the analysis ofmultinominal logistical regression. Students’ choice between SGE and SVE is mostly affected by personal academic performance, while family economic status exerts asignificant effect on the choice between Employment and SVE.(4) Whether juniorhigh school students know about the financial aid for rural SVE students or not won’talter their intention. There are still some vocational students from poor families neverbeen aided of any type of fiscal grant in the past two years;(5) Economic burden ofrural families expended in supporting their children to receive SVE in Central andWestern China, who appear thirsty more for larger amount of financial aid, is farheavier than rural families in Eastern China.Implications for policy are finally explored:(1) Central government may maintainthe stability and continuity of fiscal policies issued to develop SVE;(2) It is stronglyrecommended to abolish policy that aims to maintain the roughly equal enrollmentbetween SGE and SVE;(3) In addition, the central government should consider toincrease the amount of financial aid for rural SVE students, especially for those inCentral and Western China so that it can change the present “one size fits all”financial aid to secondary vocational students. |
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