A Study Of The Effect Of Financial Aid On Full-Time Post-Graduates’ Engagement

The government approved Opinions on Improving the Financial Aid System for Postgraduate Education early 2013, the purpose of which was to establish a system to provide graduate students with multiple financial aid programs to help them more engaged in their study. This study explored the impact of the financial aid policies from the Opinions on full-time postgraduates’ learning commitment, focusing on four of the financial aid policies, namely, national grants, national scholarship, academic scholarship, and three assistant-position subsidies.A survey of about 429 full-time postgraduates in five universities in Xi’an and some interviews were conducted. The major findings are as follows: The newly established financial aid policies have significant impact on the learning engagement of the participants. Specifically, the national grants have indirectly influenced their time commitment to learning and the quality of emotional engagement by helping reduce pressure in life, part-time jobs and psychological burden. National scholarship and academic scholarship play an incentive role to a certain extent. Furthermore, national scholarship is significantly associated with learning engagement, and academic scholarship significantly associated with actual learning engagement. Besides, the distinction of learning engagement among different grades is small. In addition, scholarships indirectly influence learning engagement by influencing students’ course selection and research publication. Research assistant subsidy is significantly associated with learning engagement, teaching assistant subsidy has no significant influence on their learning engagement; and administrative assistant subsidy has a negative effect on learning engagement. Some negative impacts are found chiefly from the interviews, for which some suggestions were proposed.