Higher Education Reform in China: Beyond the Expansion

A major transformation of Chinese higher education (HE) has taken place over the past decade – China has reshaped its higher education sector from elite to mass education with the number of graduates having quadrupled to three million a year over six years. China is exceptional among lower income countries in using tertiary education as a development strategy on such a scale, aiming to improve the quality of its graduates, and make HE available to as many of its citizens as possible.

This book provides a critical examination the challenges to the development and sustainability of higher education in China: Can its universities move from quantity to quality? How will so many graduates find jobs in line with their expectations? Can Britain and other western countries continue to benefit from China’s education boom? What are the prospects for collaboration in research? This book evaluates the prospects for Chinese and foreign HE providers, regulators and other stakeholders. It introduces the key changes in China’s HE programme since the Opening-Up policy in 1978 and analyses the achievements and the challenges over the subsequent three decades. Furthermore, it sheds light on new reforms that are likely to take place in the future, particularly as a result of the ongoing international financial crisis.

W. John Morgan is UNESCO Chair of the Political Economy of Education, School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK, and Chairman of the UK National Commission for UNESCO. He was recently guest co-editor of a Special Issue of the European Journal of Education on 'Chinese-European Co-operation in Education'.

Bin Wu is Senior Research Fellow at the China Policy Institute in the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. His recent publications include, as co-editor, Sustainable Reform and Development in Post-Olympic China (also published by Routledge) and guest co-editor of a Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary China on ‘Openness of Chinese Society: progresses and challenges’.