政府奖学金院校名录对自费留学生的信号作用

The Signaling Effect of the Institutions List of Chinese Government International Scholarship on Self-funded International Students

中国政府一直通过名列"政府奖学金院校名录"的高校招收奖学金留学生,近年来随着高等教育的快速国际化和政府加强教育对外开放工作的力度加大,这一名录也在不断地扩大。考虑到留学生在选择院校时存在的信息不对称,我们认为入选名录很有可能起到了一个信号作用,以帮助留学生甄别出水平更高的高校。本文建立了一个基于信息经济学的信号模型描述这一机制,利用1999-2013年间628所高校的来华留学生数据,以及双向固定效应模型,估计入选名录这一自然实验对招收自费留学生的影响,我们发现:入选名录确实会导致相关院校自费留学生数量的增加,并且对非学历项目的自费留学生影响更为明显。

Each year the Chinese government announced the list of higher education institutions whose international students are eligible for government scholarship. As the internationalization of higher education intensifies and government has promulgated strategies to promote the open-up of its education sector, thus, the list of institutions has been expanding in recent years. Considering thatI there may be severe information asymmetry of their selection of universities, the“List”can act as a signal to assist international students in identifying better quality colleges, and it can also help Chinese colleges to attract more overseas students. In this paper, we firstly construct a signaling model that is well- known in Information Economics to describe this mechanism. Then by employing the panel data of 628 Chinese tertiary institutions between 1999 and 2013 and two-way fixed effects model, we try to examine the validity of the signaling model. The main findings are that entering the“List”does increase the number of international students with scholarship in the institution, it also significantly increases the number of self-funded international students. Moreover, the signaling effect is more salient among non-degree students than among degree students.