The Paradigm Shift of Sustainable Development in Educational Economics in the Digitization-Intelligent Era: A Kuhnian Analysis

This study employs Kuhn’s paradigm theory to analyze the imperative transition toward sustainable development in educational economics amid the Digitalization-Intelligent Era. Through factor deconstruction, we reveal that traditional educational economics—anchored in human capital theory and linear causal frameworks —fails to explain the dynamic entanglement of education, technology, and institutions in a system reconfigured as a multi-agent adaptive network (encompassing learners, AI, institutions, and policies). To address this paradigm crisis, five fundamental shifts are essential: theoretical reframing from linear causality to dynamic network interactions, methodological evolution from static inference to real-time predictive analytics, value reorientation from economic rationality to human-centered co-creation, academic community derived from a single discipline loop to cross-disciplinary integration with emerging fields like data science and behavioral economics tec. and exemplar diversification from singular models to multimodal policy validation, which not only clarifies the paradigm crisis faced by traditional educational economics but also provides a clear transformation path for its sustainable development.