Abstract: Diversification of suppliers is the goal of higher education reform in China. The government should change from a single supplier in the past to one supplier and compete with other suppliers on an equal footing. In addition, the government, as the main body of supply, should not only further increase the investment in higher education, but also manage and supervise the whole supply of higher education from the system and methods, so as to meet the effective needs of society and promote the development of higher education. Keywords: higher education reform; Public goods theory; The choice of reform path; As a systematic theory, the theory of supplier diversification of public goods first appeared in the 1980s of 19. Its establishment is to meet the needs of state intervention in the economy, which theoretically shows that government behavior is integrated with market economic activities. The so-called public goods refer to products and services that are not competitive and exclusive in consumption. Samuelson's classic definition of public goods is that everyone's consumption of this product will not lead to the reduction of others' consumption of this product. Higher education is undoubtedly the key to national stability, health and sustainable development; The favored son of heaven is also the source of hope for the country's prosperity and national rejuvenation. However, with the continuous development and deepening of China's higher education reform, many problems are bothering us, such as the decline in the quality of education and teaching after the expansion of enrollment, and the difficulty of employment for college graduates. Faced with social doubts, the future of higher education reform has become the focus of academic attention. Higher education is a kind of public goods in a moderate scale (also called quasi-public goods or club public goods). The government has the obligation and responsibility to intervene, influence and correct the ideas, routes and objectives of higher education reform with visible hands, so as to make it develop in a direction conducive to social progress and national prosperity. I. Analysis of the Characteristics of Higher Education Based on the Theory of Public Goods Supply Since the 1990s, China's higher education reform has made a lot of progress in theory and practice, especially since the expansion of colleges and universities, which has greatly increased people's opportunities to enjoy higher education, helped to improve the overall quality of society and promoted the progress and development of the whole country. 1. The publicity of higher education. The confirmation of different educational nature has always been a hot issue for scholars. For example, Li Yining believes that there are five types of educational products in China at present: education with the nature of pure public goods (such as compulsory education), education with the nature of public goods (such as all kinds of school education provided by government investment), education with the nature of mixed public goods (such as schools or training courses set up by an organization for its own members) and education with the nature of private products. Wang Shanmai believes that education is a non-profit public sector, and education provides public products or mixed public products, not private products; Compulsory education is a public product and non-compulsory education is a mixed public product. Lao Kaisheng believes that public products such as education can be further transformed into private products or quasi-private products from the perspective of non-monopoly of education, the relationship between public products and the market, and the competitiveness and separability of products. The understanding of the nature of higher education can be divided into two stages: in the first stage, the government is the only supplier of higher education and fully undertakes the education funds. At this time, higher education belongs to the category of pure public goods; In the second stage, with the deepening of the reform, the changes in the supply subject and funding mode of higher education have correspondingly changed the nature of higher education, which has the characteristics of mixed public goods, and we can call it quasi-public goods. The so-called quasi-public goods refer to products and services that are not competitive and exclusive in consumption, that is, higher education is not competitive in consumption, but it can easily be exclusive. For example, colleges and universities charge students a certain fee to provide products and services for specific groups. These products and services have good external effects under a certain scale (number of students), but beyond a certain scale, crowding-out effect will inevitably occur, thus affecting the consumption quantity and quality of other consumers. Therefore, we can also call it a club product. As a pure public product and quasi-public product, higher education has fairness and positive external effects. The so-called fairness means that as an educational institution, it is open to all members of society and everyone can enjoy this product and service. For example, in early higher education, candidates selected through fair competition (college entrance examination) can get this education free of charge; Nowadays, higher education also needs fair competition (college entrance examination) to get the opportunity to receive higher education, but the education funds are no longer borne by the state. The positive external effect means that after an individual obtains higher education, not only the individual benefits, but also the social benefits are obvious. For example, from the contribution of knowledge dissemination, it plays a subtle and positive role in improving national quality, enhancing comprehensive national strength, promoting national culture, spreading human scientific and cultural knowledge, and raising public democratic awareness. See table 1 for the public product attributes of higher education. 2. Economic characteristics of higher education. The consumption of higher education products and services will generate huge benefits. First of all, the improvement of personal spiritual level (spiritual benefits) and the progress of social civilization (social benefits) and so on, these intangible benefits can not be measured and estimated in detail. In addition, from the perspective of economics, higher education also has considerable economic characteristics, which are embodied in: (1) new growth points. Today, with the rapid economic development, the traditional means of stimulating consumption and expanding domestic demand are already very weak. What can become a new growth point of our society? Obviously, higher education is undoubtedly in a prominent position. This is rare in the history of world economic and educational development, and it can be said to be a great innovation. A number of surveys show that the first choice for family savings in China is to invest in children's education, especially higher education. It is this specific national condition that strengthens and magnifies the economic characteristics of higher education. In this regard, Dr. Tang Min of the Asian Development Bank pointed out in the Economic News of February 1999 that if the enrollment of colleges and universities in China doubles within three years, all freshmen will pay their own fees, with the annual tuition fee of 1000 yuan and other expenses of 4-5 thousand yuan per year, then colleges and universities will be able to collect 20 billion more tuition fees each year and spend about 40 million on campus. Considering the indirect consumption driven by this money, calculated by China investment multiplier, this 24 billion yuan can stimulate investment and final consumption by about 654.38+000 billion yuan. In my opinion, it doesn't matter how credible this view is. What is important is that higher education can indeed greatly stimulate domestic consumption demand and stimulate short-term economic growth in the short term. On the other hand, more importantly, China residents have the will and ability to pay for higher education, which makes it possible for higher education to become the current economic growth point of China. (2) Industrial development. China's higher education has developed rapidly, especially after the CPC Central Committee and the State Council made the important decision of 1999 to expand the enrollment of colleges and universities, higher education has achieved leap-forward development. According to the data of the Ministry of Education, by the end of 2005, the gross enrollment rate of higher education in China had reached 2 1%, and the number of students was 21kloc-0/265,438+10,000, ranking first in the world. The theory of higher education popularization was founded by Martin Trow in the early 1970s. He took 65,438+05% and 50% as the criteria to divide the stages of popularization and popularization of higher education, that is, higher education with a gross enrollment rate below 65,438+05% is called elite education, higher education with a gross enrollment rate between 65,438+05-50% is called mass education, and higher education with a gross enrollment rate above 50% is called popularization. China's huge demand for higher education and related data show that higher education is open to the public; The era of industrialization has arrived, and many scholars have put forward the slogan of industrialization development of higher education. The so-called educational industrialization refers to the process of using modern industrial development mechanism and management means to promote the diversification of higher education running subjects, the socialization of running direction and the efficiency of running input and output. Although there is controversy about the industrialization of education, there are still concrete manifestations in China at present-mainly a series of behaviors that use social idle capital to build and operate university towns, vocational colleges, secondary colleges and private colleges, and allow profits. Second, the responsibility of the government in the process of higher education reform. As one of the main providers of higher education, the government not only needs to improve its financial input, system and management level, but also needs to strengthen its market awareness and comprehensively regulate and guide the field of higher education from a macro perspective. 1. Increase the financial input of higher education and create a good development environment. Increasing financial input, optimizing allocation, integrating various educational resources and building a strong platform for higher education can play a significant leading role, thus effectively promoting the rapid and stable development of higher education in China. Taking "2 1 1 Project" and "985 Project" as examples, it is a successful attempt of the reform and development model of higher education that the government concentrates resources on key construction of some universities with good foundation and high level. These two projects have well realized the strategic concept of promoting overall development with key construction, greatly improved the conditions for running colleges and universities, and improved the ability of colleges and universities to cultivate high-level innovative talents and carry out high-tech development. A number of key disciplines have become the main bases for national high-level personnel training, knowledge innovation and technological innovation. 2. Constantly adjust the knowledge structure and education mode to meet the effective needs of society. As a professional education, higher education directly delivers all kinds of high-level talents and services to the society, so it must keep close contact with the market. However, the traditional higher education in China is not closely related to the market demand, and the school-running mode is closed and lagging behind, which leads to its failure to reflect the economic development trend in time and accurately and meet the changes of effective social demand. Therefore, the government must understand the current social demand development trend, assess the situation, and constantly adjust the knowledge structure and education model of higher education, so as to guide higher education to maintain the correct direction. 3. Establish a modern concept of property rights and implement the autonomy of running a university. From the perspective of property right theory, implementing the autonomy of running a university is the premise of the rapid development of higher education in China. The relationship between the government and universities is not static. It should be noted that the transformation from traditional government control to government management should be one of the goals of higher education reform. Therefore, it is not only an opportunity to rebuild the relationship between the government and universities, but also an inherent requirement of higher education reform to establish a modern concept of property rights, realize the separation of university ownership and school-running rights, and make universities become the main body of market economy with clear property rights and operational autonomy. 4. Establish strict access, audit and incentive system. With the opening of higher education to social (private) capital, there is no strict and unified standard for the scale and quality of some colleges and universities. What's more, we only regard higher education as our cash cow and only pay attention to our own economic benefits. Everything is money-oriented, which will eventually lead to social doubts about our higher education system and thus lose credibility. Therefore, the government should first set a certain threshold, introduce corresponding laws and regulations and supporting measures, examine the qualifications of higher education providers, and implement effective supervision in the process of providing higher education products and services. Secondly, the higher education products it provides should be comprehensively evaluated and verified to ensure the quality and improve the competitiveness of consumers. Third, establish a reasonable incentive system to reward providers of high-quality higher education services and products through financial subsidies, tax relief or other market-oriented means. Three. Analysis of the Predicament of Higher Education in China At present, the predicament of higher education in China is mainly manifested in the unbalanced development of supply and demand, and a single supply cannot meet the increasingly diversified and multi-level social needs. This shortage of higher education resources is reflected in two aspects: the shortage of supply quantity and the defect of supply quality. 1. Population base is too large. With the in-depth development of knowledge economy and the improvement of people's living standards, people's demand for higher education is increasingly strong. Although higher education has achieved rapid growth and development in recent years, compared with China's excessive population base, it is still in short supply. The author refers to the relevant data of the Ministry of Education and summarizes China in 2003. The enrollment data of college entrance examination in 2006 are shown in Table 2. As can be seen from Table 2, although the number of college students enrolled in 2003-2006 increased by 6.5438+0.5 million, with the increase of enrollment base, the gross admission rate of college entrance examination decreased by 6 percentage points, so 4.2 million people were deprived of the opportunity to receive higher education in 2006. It can be predicted that in the next five years, the gross enrollment rate may decline before reaching the population peak, and more people will lose the opportunity to receive higher education. Therefore, the author believes that the huge population base is one of the main reasons for the serious shortage of higher education resources in China. 2. Poor quality supply and dislocation of knowledge structure. The shortage of higher education includes not only the shortage of quantity, but also the low quality supply of quality and the dislocation of knowledge structure, which leads to the ineffectiveness or inefficiency of this resource supply and further deepens its shortage. First of all, due to the increasing absolute consumption of higher education resources, the incidence of crowding effect has greatly increased, and there has been a phenomenon of scale inefficiency, which has greatly reduced the consumption quality of educational resources, mainly in the aspects of insufficient total number of teachers, backward organizational management level, and increased incidence of teaching accidents (such as absenteeism). According to the survey of foreign language teachers in 99 colleges and universities by relevant departments, the class hours per week are generally above 14, of which 20-29 classes account for 32% of the total number of teachers, and 5.4% have more than 30 classes. According to research, it is most suitable for foreign language teachers to have about 8 classes a week. The expansion of class teaching scale is too fast, and the phenomenon of one or two hundred students attending classes increases, which makes it more difficult for teachers to organize teaching, which seriously affects the teaching quality and teaching effect. 3. The contradiction between high input and low output. In August 2006, the Social Investigation Center of China Youth Daily conducted a survey involving 8777 people. The results show that 34.7% of the respondents feel "sorry" when talking about their college life. The consumption of higher education has not only abstract spiritual benefits, but also visible economic benefits, so we can't escape the comparative analysis of its input and output, that is, it depends on whether the rate of return of higher education is greater than (or equal to) expectations. Many educational economists have conducted in-depth research on general education investment and higher education investment, and also given different estimates. Table 3 is an estimate of the social rate of return and personal rate of return of different types of education investment in different income countries. As can be seen from Table 3, the return on investment in higher education is very high for both society and individuals. It is worth noting that the return on investment in higher education in different countries decreases with their income, that is to say, the return on higher education in high-income countries is generally lower than that in low-income countries. This shows that with the rapid economic growth in China, the higher the income, the lower the rate of return on higher education. In other words, assuming that the input (excluding the opportunity cost) is certain, aside from other unfavorable influences such as unreasonable knowledge structure and specialty setting, the input and output of China's higher education are lower than its expected level. Fourth, the choice of the reform path of diversification of higher education providers in China Because of the public product characteristics of higher education, the supply of higher education products and services has become the unshirkable responsibility of the government, especially the traditional planning and distribution characteristics of our country and the people's strong trust in the government, which makes the government become the core force of higher education supply. However, it should be noted that government supply is not equal to government production. Government supply. Higher education products and services can be provided through direct production by the government and commissioned production by social (private) departments. 1. Directly produced by the government. The so-called direct production by the government means that the government establishes higher education institutions and directly produces higher education products and services. According to the historical situation of our country, the government's supply of higher education can be divided into two forms: