The marketization of educational industrialization refers to the free trade of educational services between educational service providers and their buyers, that is, individuals buy educational services with money. The implied prerequisite of education marketization is that those who enjoy educational services must have sufficient purchasing power, because those who can buy educational services in the market must of course have sufficient purchasing power.
So far, China government has not made it clear that education should be market-oriented. However, in the last 20 years, the wave of marketization has also violently impacted the field of education. The marketization of China's education field is mainly the spontaneous behavior of both providers and demanders of educational services, which is mostly illegal according to official laws and regulations. Even so, this so-called "marketization" of education often aggravates the distortion of resource allocation caused by information asymmetry in the market economy. The biggest evil consequence of this so-called "market-oriented education" is to strengthen the inequality mechanism in society and aggravate the inequality at the starting point of life.
So far, the "marketization" of China's educational services is basically on the edge of the educational field, and it is often illegal or even illegal.
The initial market-oriented transaction was that parents violated the relevant regulations and provided high "sponsorship" to schools to let their children enter "quality education" schools. Later, it developed into such a "good" school, which recruited "school choice students" with high fees or disguised fees. Another so-called "transaction" with illegal color is that schools increase fees for students in various names, or even charge fees illegally.
Later, a breakthrough in "market-oriented education" was the emergence of "private schools". The government gradually allows private individuals to set up and operate "private" primary and secondary schools and even universities, and the expenses and income of these schools basically come from various fees and disguised fees for students. The actual cost of these private schools is usually much higher than that of public schools. Nevertheless, in recent years, news of the closure of "private schools" has often come out.
Under such a "market-oriented trend", there has been a breakthrough in "market-oriented education"-since the second half of the 1990s, Chinese universities have officially charged tuition fees to college students, making going to college a "semi-market-oriented transaction" with high tuition fees.
The dirtiest thing about market-oriented education is all kinds of unconventional education that "spend money to buy diplomas". This kind of "spending money to buy diplomas" education is mostly concentrated in marginal fields such as adult education and amateur training, often under the banner of "postgraduate courses" and "MBA training courses", and the fees charged are usually higher than the general higher education fees, while the so-called "MBO academic education" sponsored by some famous universities costs an astonishing number of hundreds of thousands of yuan a year. In most cases, the courses offered by this unconventional education and the exams that need to be passed are obviously lower than the normal level, so it is obviously "paying for the diploma". In extreme cases, some of this unconventional education hardly provides any decent course education and exams, and it has become an out-and-out "spending money to buy diplomas."
In recent years, "education marketization" has intensified. Educators are increasingly aware of the ways to increase personal monetary income and evade government laws and regulations. The illegal and even illegal "educational market-oriented transaction" has been renovated day by day, and many new forms have been developed: the graduate tutor extorts money from the students privately when enrolling students, "paying me to recruit you as a student"; When enrolling students in universities, students who are lower than the enrollment scores are admitted at a fee; Teachers in primary and secondary schools put what they should say in class into tuition-based "remedial classes" after class, while parents dare not let their children go to such "remedial classes" without paying money; The "key" public schools with the reputation of "high teaching quality" have turned their core teaching ability into "private schools" with high fees, and made money through "market-oriented transactions of legally charged enrollment".
A considerable part of this "educational market transaction" violates government regulations, and the government's education authorities often ban it again, but they often ban it again and again. The reason is that the providers of this kind of "educational service" have a strong impulse to make profits through market transactions, and the demanders of these "educational services" often dare not disobey their providers' payment requirements, and sometimes even take the initiative to pay for this kind of "educational service" themselves. In some extreme cases, especially those who "spend money to buy diplomas", both schools and "educated individuals" try their best to increase the "market-oriented transaction of education" and form a kind of collusion.
This so-called "market-oriented transaction" of education will often aggravate the distortion of resource allocation caused by information asymmetry in the market economy.
The initial function of education is to increase the knowledge and skills of the educated. As far as contemporary mainstream economics is concerned, the original function of education is to help individuals accumulate their "human capital". But in the modern market economy, the reason why individuals are so generally willing to receive a lot of education is not only to increase their potentially useful human capital. People receive more education, to a great extent, in order to send a signal about their ability and productivity to employers, so as to get rid of the employment dilemma brought about by information asymmetry.
In the economic theoretical model of information asymmetry developed in recent decades, there is a special model to demonstrate the signal transmission function of education in the labor market with information asymmetry.
This model is based on the most common information asymmetry in the labor market: because employees know their own abilities and productivity better than employers, employers don't know which candidate has strong abilities and high productivity, and which one has poor abilities and low productivity, but he should have treated employees differently according to productivity in salary, giving high-productivity employees high salaries and low-productivity employees low salaries.
According to signaling model, in order to distinguish employees with high productivity from employees with low productivity, a screening mechanism is established to enable employees to make correct self-choices automatically. Employers will pay different salaries according to employees' education level, and give employees with high academic qualifications appropriate high salaries. Because employees with high productivity have strong ability, they usually have high learning efficiency, and the subjective cost of individuals with the same education is relatively low. They will think that the high-paying benefits of obtaining a high degree of education exceed the subjective cost of working hard to obtain a high degree of education, so they are willing to obtain a high degree of education. However, for employees with low productivity, the personal subjective cost of obtaining the same degree is higher because of their low learning efficiency. They will think that the subjective cost of working hard to get a high degree is higher than their high salary, so they choose not to get a high degree. In this way, an appropriate salary policy based on academic qualifications will encourage employees to make their own choices to obtain academic qualifications, thus sending a correct signal to employers about their productivity and solving the difficulties caused by information asymmetry when employers determine employees' wages.
Such a mode of "signaling with academic qualifications" is in line with the objective situation in the market economy, especially for many economic phenomena in developed market economy countries. However, it is this model that shows that in the case of asymmetric information in the labor market, obtaining a high degree may not be to increase employees' personal human capital, but only to send a signal about personal ability. This conclusion is also in line with our observation of empirical facts to a great extent: in reality, many people study hard just to get a diploma that can send a signal, and they don't care how much they really learn. However, in the case that this kind of learning is only to obtain high academic qualifications, the energy spent by employees on learning and educating these people becomes a pure waste of social resources, but this is a waste of resources that has to be made to overcome the economic problems brought about by information asymmetry.
The analysis of the behavior that obtaining a high degree is only to send a signal about personal ability shows that the extremely developed and huge education in contemporary times is caused by the information asymmetry in the labor market to a considerable extent, and it is formed to overcome the problems brought about by information asymmetry. Educated people study and compete for academic qualifications, and their ultimate goal is often just to convey the signal of personal ability. The resources invested in education are not productive waste, but the price that information asymmetry forces the market economy to pay.
However, market-oriented education only allows those who can afford tuition fees to receive education and obtain academic qualifications, which is likely to weaken the function of academic qualifications to transmit signals about personal ability, thus weakening the role of academic education in reducing information asymmetry, thus further aggravating the distortion of information asymmetry on resource allocation in the market economy. The reason is that academic qualifications can send a signal about personal ability because academic qualifications truly reflect a person's education level, while people with high productivity generally have stronger learning ability and lower subjective cost of learning, so they are willing to learn more things to increase the same amount of future monetary income. The marketization of education makes the education level depend not only on the individual's learning ability, but also on the individual's existing ability to pay and wealth, which cannot but strongly interfere with the role of academic qualifications in signaling personal ability.
Market-oriented education may weaken the function of academic qualifications to transmit personal ability signals from two levels:
On the first level, those "educational market transactions" that "spend money to buy diplomas" will completely destroy the function of academic qualifications to transmit personal ability signals.
The real "spending money to buy a diploma" means "I give you money and you give me a diploma", no matter how much the diploma winner actually learned. The academic qualifications marked on this diploma can neither prove how much the diploma holder has learned nor even prove how much the diploma issuer has educated him. Even how much you have learned and how much real education you have received can't prove, and of course it can't prove how much learning ability the diploma holder has. In this way, the real "diploma bought with money" does not convey the signal about the real ability of diploma holders, or strictly speaking, it conveys the wrong signal. A degree is bought, and it sends the wrong signal. There are so many people in the world, especially China, who are keen on "spending money on diplomas". Most of their purposes are to send the wrong signal, cover up their own imbecility, disguise themselves as people with strong abilities, and defraud employers of high salaries.
In this way, the "educational market transaction" such as "spending money to buy a diploma" makes the school diploma no longer able to send a signal about personal ability. The essence of "spending money to buy a diploma" is to use incomplete information in society to create false information, which will further aggravate the information asymmetry in the labor market.
Even if people who have obtained diplomas have received corresponding education and learned corresponding knowledge and skills, only those who can afford tuition fees can receive market-oriented education, which will make academic qualifications no longer effectively prove their personal abilities. This is the second level that market-oriented education weakens academic qualifications and transmits personal ability signals.
Even those who have obtained diplomas have learned the corresponding knowledge and skills, because only those who can afford tuition can receive education and obtain diplomas, so it is very likely that some people who have received education and obtained diplomas are much worse than many people who have not received education and obtained diplomas. The reason why the former person got the diploma and the latter person didn't is because the former person had enough money to pay the tuition at the most suitable age for education, and the latter person didn't have enough money to pay the tuition at that time. In this case, even real education can no longer provide enough information, and the role of education level and educational background in reducing information asymmetry in the labor market is greatly weakened-employers can't confidently judge the ability and productivity of candidates according to their educational background, because many people with low educational background are more productive than those with high educational background.
This involves one of the most explosive issues: university education fees. In recent ten years, universities in China have never charged students tuition fees, but have charged the vast majority of students. In fact, this policy of charging tuition fees only allows those who have the ability to receive higher education, which can be regarded as a policy of "making higher education truly market-oriented". However, the tuition fee of five or six thousand yuan per student per year is already a heavy burden for ordinary urban workers' families with an annual salary of about 10 thousand yuan, and it is an unbearable burden for rural families with an annual per capita income of only two thousand yuan.
Under this charging policy, children who used to be a major event for rural residents were admitted to universities, but now it has become a major worry for rural families and even turned into a terrible tragedy. Many rural families sell everything to pay their children's tuition and are heavily in debt; There are families who are poor because their children go to college in the countryside. The juxtaposition of "poverty caused by going to college" and "poverty caused by illness" has become one of the main reasons for the emergence of new poor households and farmers returning to poverty in rural areas. Every time the results of the college entrance examination are announced, the media in China will report many suicides of "urging tuition fees". The parents of poor students committed suicide because they could not afford the tuition for their children to go to college. Such tragedies keep happening, which makes anyone with conscience question the legitimacy of the current university tuition policy.
Our previous analysis has shown that even if people who have obtained diplomas have learned the corresponding knowledge and skills, only those who can afford the tuition fees can get the market-oriented education of diplomas, which will greatly weaken the role of obtaining diplomas in reducing information asymmetry in the labor market. At present, the selection mechanism of "having money to study, not having money to study" in university education will certainly weaken the beneficial role of education in selecting leaders and high-paying personnel in all aspects and greatly reduce the efficiency of China's economic and social operation.
People who are full of neo-liberal economic dogma will argue that the educational choice mechanism of "having money to study but not having money to study" is not the fault of market-oriented education that charges tuition fees, but the fault of not making full use of the financial and credit markets. As long as we give full play to the role of the financial market, so that those who are really able to learn can get appropriate loans during their schooling, those poor people will be able to pay tuition fees, and they will not be unable to go to school because they cannot afford it.
This statement sounds reasonable; Contemporary western developed countries such as the United States, Germany and other countries have systematically issued loans to college students, which seems to confirm the correctness of this statement. It is under the control of such an idea that China has implemented the system of granting "student loans" to poor college students in the banking system while charging tuition fees from universities.
But in fact, the wonderful function of "college student loan" given by the thinking mode of neo-liberal economics does not exist. The new development of contemporary mainstream microeconomic theory has already clarified that the financial market fails to allocate resources, largely because the borrowers of funds have information advantages over the lenders of funds. It is in the mainstream microeconomic analysis that "college student loan" has become a typical case of financial market failure. These theoretical models show that financial institutions that provide loans to college students, especially poor college students, are facing great risks of not being able to recover the principal and interest of loans, because applicants know better than financial institutions that they have the ability and willingness to repay the borrowed funds as promised, which in turn makes financial institutions reluctant to provide loans to poor college students, thus making the "student loan for college students" unable to play its normal role.
This theoretical analysis is strongly supported by empirical facts. In recent years, the repayment of "student loans" for college students in China is not good, which makes many banking institutions reluctant to continue to issue "student loans" to college students. One of the countermeasures that the government and economists have come up with is to learn from western developed countries, systematically establish the so-called "social credit mechanism" for the whole people, comprehensively establish the credit files of college students, and force college students who have borrowed loans to repay honestly by threatening that "those who have not repaid will never borrow again".
However, such a social credit mechanism itself is not enough to scare off the poor who really have no learning ability and let them automatically not apply for loans that they know are impossible to repay. Such poor people who have no learning ability may not be able to repay any loans, so they should take advantage of any loan opportunity to borrow money and not pay it back, as long as they can improve their lives with borrowed loans. For such people, it is the best choice for the above universities to obtain loans from financial institutions for personal consumption without repayment. Although the "social credit mechanism" will prevent him from obtaining personal loans in the future, it will not prevent him from not repaying the loans. Anyway, he has no ability to repay the loan, and he has only one chance to borrow money under the "social credit mechanism" at most. The above universities gave him the opportunity to borrow money and not pay it back, and he had no reason not to take advantage of it.
For this reason, even if the credit information mechanism of the whole society works normally, it is impossible to completely solve the problem that poor children have no money to study by relying on loans from financial institutions. The fundamental reason is the combination of information asymmetry and future uncertainty: financial institutions that issue loans do not know which students who apply for loans have enough learning ability to repay loans, which students do not have enough learning ability or will not repay loans, and many students who apply for loans are not necessarily fully aware of whether they can finally complete their studies in the future.
In this case, for those who can complete their studies, if the increased income from completing their studies exceeds all the costs he paid for his studies, including the tuition fees paid by his loans, under the effective "social credit mechanism", repaying the loans as agreed is the best choice; However, if not all the loans can be used to pay tuition fees, but at least some of them can be used for personal general consumption, then some poor children who have no learning ability and cannot repay their loans in the future will have the incentive to apply for loans to help them go to school; Even if the school loan can only be used to pay tuition fees, many poor children who don't realize that they can't finish their studies will think that it is their best choice to get a school loan, so they will apply for a loan to fund their schooling. In this case, the financial institution that issues loans will fall into the same embarrassing situation as the employer to some extent: his interests require him to distinguish between those who can finish their studies and those who can't, but he is not sure whether everyone who applies for loans can really finish their studies.
Because of this, developed western market economy countries do not rely entirely on loans from financial institutions to solve the problem that poor children can't afford tuition fees when they go to college. After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany (former West Germany) exempted students from tuition fees for a long time, so there is no problem that poor children can't afford to pay tuition fees when they go to college. American universities generally charge students tuition fees, but there are many funds and institutions in the United States that offer scholarships to college students. They provide scholarships to a large number of students, which helps to solve the problem that poor children can't afford to go to college.
Most importantly, only those who can afford the tuition are allowed to receive education. Market-oriented education will only aggravate the inequality of social members at the starting point.
In a society with private property, the children of poor people without property are not equal to the children of families with a lot of property at the beginning of their lives. Children of the rich will spend more and live a much better life than children of the poor. Not only that, the children of the rich can get the initial working capital from the inheritance, so they are in a favorable position in the market competition from the beginning.
The completely market-oriented education only allows those who can afford tuition to receive education, which further aggravates the inequality of young people with different family assets at the starting point of life. This kind of inequality in the starting point of life includes not only the inequality in the initial property owned at the starting point of life, but also the inequality in the degree of satisfaction that can be enjoyed throughout life.
The "initial property owned by the starting point of life" mentioned here is the kind of "property" mentioned in theoretical economics and finance, including not only tangible property such as material property and currency, but also the part of property that discounts future living income into present value.
In the market economy, a person's income depends not only on his personal talents and inherited family heritage, but also on his education level to a great extent. People with more education usually have more human capital, which in itself can make them get higher income. As mentioned above, a well-educated person also sends a signal to employers that he has higher working ability, which is more helpful for them to get higher wages. In this way, in the market economy, the difference in education level itself will cause the income inequality of workers.
Under the completely market-oriented education system, if there is no loan system to help the children of poor families pay tuition fees, the children of poor families will be unable to receive education because they can't afford to pay tuition fees, thus losing an opportunity to increase their future income and improve their status, and their initial wealth will not increase because of education. The decisions made by those families who have enough property to pay for their children's education level will ensure that the increased income of their children after completing their studies exceeds all the costs they pay for their children's education. Of course, the cost of education includes the tuition fees paid, as well as the monetary equivalent of children's efforts for education. In this way, this decision on education increases the initial property owned by the educated at the starting point of life, which includes the present value of discounted life income as the initial wealth.
In this case, only those who can afford to pay tuition fees are allowed to receive market-oriented education, which makes it impossible for people with different properties to get the same education. Only those who have enough tangible property can increase their initial property through education, while the children of the poor are not allowed to increase their initial property through education, thus aggravating the inequality in the starting point of life among social members with different tangible property.
Compared with the free education system that does not charge students tuition fees, even if there is a perfect student loan system including the above-mentioned social credit mechanism, the market-oriented education that only allows those who pay tuition fees to receive education will aggravate the inequality among members of society at the starting point, but what is aggravated here is mainly the inequality in subjective utility. Thanks to a sound financial system, poor children who have no money can also receive education, but they must repay the "student loan" used to pay tuition fees with the income from later work. If the uncertainty mentioned above is not taken into account, the decision made by the poor should also increase the initial property owned by their children at the starting point of life after education. We can even admit that in this case, the educated children of poor families and the children of rich families have added as much initial property at the starting point of their lives. However, compared with the situation that education does not pay tuition fees, the market-oriented education that pays tuition fees through education reduces the initial property of the children of the poor and the children of the rich, and the amount of reduction corresponds to the tuition fees paid. Because the children of the rich have more property than the children of the poor, the marginal utility of wealth is decreasing or its marginal substitution rate for leisure is decreasing. The poor who have reduced the same amount of initial property due to tuition fees lose much more in subjective utility than the rich. This is the subjective inequality at the starting point of life aggravated by market-oriented education.
The above-mentioned in-depth analysis shows that the market-oriented education that only allows those who pay tuition fees to go to school has completely exposed the lies of "equality" and "fairness" in the private market economy.
In the mid-1980s, when China just started the market-oriented economic reform, people who were keen on market-oriented reform kept telling us that although the market economy could not guarantee "equality of results" among members of society, it could guarantee "equality of starting point" or "equality of opportunities". However, the practice of marketization of private ownership for more than 20 years has made us realize that in the market economy of private ownership, different families have great differences in material property and tangible property, which makes the younger generation on the road of life unequal in the starting point of competition. Market-oriented education, which only allows those who pay tuition fees to go to school, has aggravated this inequality at the starting point. People with unequal starting points can't have equal opportunities. A typical example is that people with different academic qualifications cannot have exactly the same opportunities in universities and scientific research institutions.
So we can understand why liberals, especially the firm advocates of marketization, almost no longer talk about "equality of starting point" or even "equality of opportunity". They know that no one will believe that the market economy can guarantee equality between people at the starting point. Perhaps more likely, they feel that the term "equal starting point" has "completed its historical mission", and now it is an outdated term that no one believes but hinders, and should be abandoned.
Moreover, economic liberals have now publicly expressed their aversion to equality, and they can only tolerate the discussion of "fairness" rather than "equality". It is this fairness that is only "procedural justice" under "constitutionalism". As for what is "procedural justice", their ambiguity can only give people the feeling of "God knows". Behind their empty talk about "procedural justice", I only see the process of making "private property inviolable" and the desire to protect the private property of the rich by so-called "legal procedures". This desire can only be understood as further aggravating the inequality at the starting point and sanctifying it.
After writing the addendum to this section, I saw a living example, which more openly aggravated the inequality at the starting point of life, indicating that the slaves of the rich in China have naturally created inequality. In 2006, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province stipulated that the children of "private entrepreneurs" could get 20 points in the senior high school entrance examination. People angrily accused this, saying that this regulation is undoubtedly announcing that "it is better to have a good father than to learn mathematics and physics well." However, the person who made this provision replied angrily: private entrepreneurs are busy with their careers and have no time to coach their children, so they have to take care of them. This kind of people probably forget that workers who work more than ten hours a day in private entrepreneurs' factories are at least as busy as private entrepreneurs and have no time to tutor their children. People who only care about private entrepreneurs forget that workers also need to be taken care of, because in their minds, workers and capitalists cannot be allowed to have any equality at all.