The years of China’s reform and opening up are also that of China’s education economics discipline from scratch, establishment, and development. The embryonic stage of educational economics theory can be traced back to The Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. However, this embryonic thought has remained dormant for about two centuries. It was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that it was deeply and systematically established and perfected by American economists and became the subject of modern education economics and the cornerstone of the independent development of the discipline.