高等教育、公共卫生意识和健康行为——兼论高校扩招对“新冠肺炎”疫情防控的影响

Higher Education, Public Health Awareness and Health Behavior --A discussion of the Impact of College Enrollment Expansion on COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control

在“新冠肺炎”疫情冲击的背景下,公共卫生问题受到空前关注。“新冠肺炎”疫情防控成效不仅取决于政府的公共卫生治理能力,还取决于民众的公共卫生安全意识和健康行为素养。基于中国调研数据,借助工具变量法,分析了高等教育对受教育者公共卫生意识和健康行为的影响。研究表明,接受高等教育对不健康行为有明显的抑制作用。通过构建高等教育-公共卫生意识-健康行为这一框架,验证了高等教育通过影响受教育者的公共卫生意识,最终改善公民健康行为这一传导机制。2020年教育部扩大硕士研究生招生和普通高校专升本招生规模的政策,不仅在当前缓冲了高校毕业生就业压力,从长期看也将有助于全面提高我国居民的公共卫生意识,改善民众的健康行为素养,从而有利于未来疫情防控。

Under the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic,public health issues have received unprecedented attention.The effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention and control depends not only on the public health governance capacity of governments,but also on the public health awareness and health behavior of the population.This paper uses the Instrumental variable method to analyze the effect of higher education on citizen’s public health awareness and health behaviors based on a self-collected survey in China.The results show that receiving higher education could significantly restrains non-healthy behaviors.By constructing a framework of higher education-public health awareness-health behaviour,the conduction mechanism that higher education improves people’s health behavior by affecting their public health awareness is tested.The policy of expanding higher education scale in 2020 not only cushioned the employment pressure of college graduates at present,but also would comprehensively improve the public health awareness and health behavior of Chinese residents in the long run,which is conducive to the prevention and control of the COVID-19 epidemic in the future.