Higher Education in Post-Mao China

2. Reforms in the Administration and Financing of Higher Education

2 Reforms in the Administration and Financing of Higher Education CHENG Kai-ming INTRODUCTION This chapter presents an overview of higher education reform in the PRC, focusing particularly on finance and administration. Finance is always a central issue in the PRC's education reform. Education reforms have started with the decentralization of the financing system; with it comes reform in many aspects in education. Higher education is no exception. However, while the reforms in basic and technical/vocational education are based on a localization of finance, higher education remains very much a central, or at most provincial, endeavour. Much of education reform in terms of structure and scale is derived from the reform Decision of 1985.1 There were three major components in this reform: institution of nine-year compulsory education, strengthening of the vocational sector in secondary education and granting of more autonomy to higher education. Compulsory education has seen remarkable success at the primary level (first to sixth grades), although there are pockets of population where universal attendance has proved difficult. Compulsory education at the junior secondary level (seventh to ninth grades) is less successful, though improving. In technical and vocational education, the enrolment at senior secondary level (lOth to 12th grades) has passed the target of 50% of total enrolment at that level. However, the original design of reform in higher education has taken a different orientation as will be 12 CHENG Kai-ming seen in the following sections, and this is very much affected by the political climate of the times. HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS Higher education is highly competitive in the PRC. The overall enrolment in 1995 was 2.91 million in the formal higher education sector and 2.59 million in the non-formal sector. The formal sector accounts for slightly higher than 3.4% of the relevant age cohort. This means that, on average, formal higher education institutions admit about half of the graduates of general senior secondary schools (i.e. the academic stream). The overall figure, of course, does not reflect the enormous disparity between regions. In Shanghai, for example, two out of three graduates from general secondary schools are admitted into higher education. In Guangzhou, the figure approaches one in two. Undergraduate studies Classifications of programmes and institutions in the PRC are by no means straight forward. Different classifications are used on different occasions depending on the subject of attention. Normative terms which carry legal status are often mixed with terms which are used only as a matter of convention. The following attempts to provide a picture of the classifications. There is a classification by programme duration. Universities are usually either three or four years in length. In exceptional cases for extremely prestigious programmes, five or even six years are permitted. Four-year programmes are known as benke (literally, the main programme) and three years, zhuanke (the specialized programme). In 1995, there were over 1.6 million students in four-year programmes as compared with slightly fewer than 1.3 million in three-year programmes.2 Until recently, there has been a general tendency for an increase in the latter. However, in developed cities, such a trend is complicated by employers' preference for four-year graduates over those from three-year programmes. The institutions themselves are not normally classified by the duration of programmes. For example, of the total of 1080 institutions in 1994, threeyear programmes were available in 1070 institutions, four-year programmes in 645 institutions. In reality, most of the 645 institutions which offered four-year programmes also offered some kind of three-year programmes. Institutions which offer only three-year programmes are sometimes Reform in the Administration and Financing of Higher Education 13 translated (for example, by the World Bank) as polytechnic universities, but there is no such corresponding category in Chinese. Credentials (xueli) from 1057 out of the 1080 (1994 figures) institutions are officially recognized as from institutions 'qualified to admit students for credential education'. In other words, upon graduation, students receive from these institutions diplomas which are officially recognized. For the first time, the list of such institutions was announced in 1995,3 with the purpose of publicly disqualifying low-quality institutions which existed. In addition, a third category included 64 cases that represented approved extensions of formal institutions. In the announcement, an asterisk (*) was placed before some institutions as a warning that such institutions were 'slightly lower than what is required by the state...