教育结构与人力资本红利——挑战、证据与路径选择

Educational Structure and Human Capital Dividend:Issues,Evidences and Policy Options

中国正处在经济转型的关键时期,人力资本的作用至关重要。高中阶段教育衔接着九年义务教育和高等教育,又是普职教育分流的开始,其如何发展是影响中国未来人力资本数量与结构的关键。尽管中国在高中阶段实行的是偏向职业教育的分流政策,但在实践中,中职教育面临需求有限、资源投入不足、教育质量不高等挑战,发展前景堪忧。国际经验表明,一国教育结构的变迁与其经济发展阶段相关,在经济发展的较高阶段,偏向普通教育的教育结构会为经济发展创造人力资本红利。因此,转型中国需要调整高中阶段教育结构,创造人力资本结构的比较优势,探寻经济持续增长的新源泉。

China is experiencing the critical period of economic transition,and human capital is vital for it. The development of high school education is the key to affect China’s future human capital quantity and structure,not only because high school education connects the nine-year compulsory education and higher education,but also because it is the beginning of the institutional tracking between general and vocational educations. China’s education policy is a bias of vocational education in high school,but in practice,the secondary vocational education is faced with inadequate demand,limited resources and low quality,the development prospect of it is grim. International experiences show that a country’s development of the educational structure is related to its economic development stage,in the higher stage of economic development,a bias of general education creates human capital dividend for economic growth.Therefore,transitional China needs to adjust the structure of high school education,to create the comparative advantage of human capital structure,and to explore the new source of sustained economic growth.