The Research On Economic Contribution Rate And Output Efficiency Of Higher Education In Yangtze River Delta

In recent years, our country has paid high attention to the development of higher education and invested a lot of resources. But more and more employers emphasize that university graduates can’t be transformed into effective workforce quickly. They are not good at practical operation and can’t meet the production requirements of the enterprise. So. we find that there has been a supply and demand contradiction between higher education and economic development. Based on the reality, this paper tries to analyze the contribution of higher education to economic growth in Yangtze River Delta.After the review of human capital theory and economic growth theory, we build a mechanism between higher education and economic growth. On the one hand, higher education can improve production efficiency and promote economic transformation by means of cultivating high-quality labor force and speeding up scientific and technological innovation. On the other hand, the growth of economic strength may provide material foundation for the development of higher education and put forward new requirements for it.On the basis of referring to Cui Yuping’s research methods, we make empirical research and find that the contribution of higher education to economic growth from 2001 to 2013 in Yangtze River Delta is only 0.73%. Comparing with domestic scholars’results, orrs is lower, mainly because of the output elasticity of labor. If we use the same output elasticity of labor, the contribution of higher education to economic growth in Yangtze River Delta will be higher.The result of our empirical research is much lower than expected and we try to find out the cause. We believe that as a production system, the operation efficiency of higher education will directly affect its contribution rate to economic growth. If it is inefficient, it can’t meet the requirements of economic development. So, the contribution to economic growth is limited. This paper uses the method of Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate the operation efficiency of the 14 universities directly under the Ministry of Education in Yangtze River delta. The results show that only six universities are in effective operation and the other eight universities’comprehensive efficiency values are all less than 1. After the study of the 14 universities, we have sufficient reason to believe that the problem of insufficient output efficiency is very common in universities in Yangtze River delta and it will restrain the contribution of higher education to economic growth. The low efficiency of 8 universities is mainly due to input redundancy、output deficiency and unreasonable development scale. At the end of the paper, we put forward relevant policy suggestions according to the above three problems.