ADJUSTMENT COSTS AND ORGANIZATIONAL INERTIA IN UNIVERSITY DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: EVIDENCE FROM CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

With the in-depth advancement of the national education digitalization strategy and the global wave of digital economy, Chinese higher education institutions are facing an inevitable trend of digital transformation, which is not only a key path to enhance educational quality and management efficiency but also a core requirement to adapt to the new round of technological revolution. However, the transformation process is constrained by dual interrelated factors: adjustment costs and organizational inertia, which interact with each other and have become key obstacles to the high-quality and in-depth development of university digitalization. Based on the balanced panel data of 632 public and private universities in China from 2021 to 2024, this paper constructs a static panel data model from the perspective of higher education economics, systematically explores the composition structure, formation mechanism and influencing factors of adjustment costs in university digital transformation, and empirically analyzes the interaction effect and internal transmission mechanism between organizational inertia and adjustment costs. The research finds that: adjustment costs in university digital transformation are composed of explicit costs (infrastructure investment, technical procurement, professional training) and implicit costs (time loss, organizational trust consumption, opportunity cost), among which implicit costs account for 42.3% of the total adjustment costs, showing a characteristic of "implicit cost-dominated"; organizational inertia, represented by structural rigidity, path dependence of resource allocation, and cognitive limitations of decision-makers, significantly increases the marginal adjustment costs of digital transformation through substitution, amplification and delay mechanisms, and this effect is more prominent in local undergraduate universities and private universities with relatively weak resource endowments; the improvement of digital governance capacity and the optimization of incentive mechanisms can effectively weaken the negative interaction between organizational inertia and adjustment costs, and the regulatory effect of digital governance capacity is more significant in "Double First-Class" universities. This paper enriches the research on the economic mechanism of university digital transformation, expands the application scenario of adjustment cost theory in the public service field, and provides theoretical reference and practical suggestions for Chinese universities to reduce transformation costs, overcome organizational inertia and promote high-quality digital development.