| 摘要: | 研究期間：10208~10307;Computed from the age range for compulsory education for UNESCO statistics, currently 68 nations have compulsory education of 10 years and over. This observations along with a review of 9-year compulsory education initiate support toward lengthening the compulsory schooling in Taiwan. To be specific, objectives for the 12-year compulsory schooling policy are clearly stated in The Plan to Promote 12-Year Compulsory Education: (1) raising nationals' quality, improving national competitiveness; (2) Promoting equal educational opportunities, realizing social justice; (3) Easing pressure from seeking further education, guiding students to develop according to their disposition; and last but not least, (4) Narrowing gap between city and country, decreasing educational gap. In this project, we consider a two-period model (agents live for two periods: childhood and adulthood) to study whether the third objective can be achieved under the 12-year compulsory education. In particular, we consider heterogeneity in both young and old generations. To be specific, the adult generation is classified into two groups: traditional parents versus liberal parents. The traditional parents are conventional in the sense that they only care about children's academic outcomes. In contrast, liberal parents are more open-minded. On the other hand, the student generation is divided into three types: academic talented, creative talented, and relatively balanced. My main hypothesis is that although the extended length of compulsory education may lead to higher human capital accumulation, it may not be welfare improving due to inefficiency. To be specific, the 12-Year National Basic Education may cause distortions through the following channels. First, compulsory schooling may force a student to acquire education more than his/her optimal level. Second, a student's talent may be under or over used due to inconsistency between parents' perspectives and students' abilities. With these considerations, we show that social welfare based on aggregate utility may not be enhanced via the 12-Year National Basic Education project. Whether longer education is better (in terms of a higher social welfare) depends on the effectiveness of the program, which is related to the economic environment. To sum up, the objective of the proposed project is threefold. First, construct a theoretical framework capable of capturing the selection process of the 12-Year National Basic Education project. Second, apply the model to conduct welfare analysis on duration of compulsory education. Third, draw policy implications from both time-series and cross-sectional dimensions. That is, we can discuss the optimal length of obligatory schooling for a given country along the process of economic development. Alternatively, we can examine the optimal provision of mandatory education among countries at a specific time point. |
