Chinese Higher Education Reform: Now and Future

1
Chinese Higher Education Reform Now and Future

• ZHONG Binglin
• Professor and PhD  
• President of Beijing Normal University

2
Four Focuses

• ? What we are doing right now?
• ? What are the driving forces for that?
• ? Where Chinese higher education will go in the
  years to come?
• ? What are our challenges in the process of
  achieving such expected pictures?

3
Status Quo

• 1.Quickest expansion of higher education
• 2.Desire to create world-class universities
• 3.Strengthen evaluation of undergraduate
  education and postgraduate education
• 4.Faculty management reform from recruiting to
  evaluation
• 5. International exchange and cooperation

4
Changes in the Enrollment Rate of Population
Aged 18-22
The enrollment rate of Chinese higher education
has rapidly increased, and Chinese higher
education has realized its translation from an
elite education to mass education.
15.0
5
Registration of Chinese Higher Education
10Thousands
The running scale of various tertiary education
institutions in 2005 is 194.9 larger than 1998,
annually increasing 16.7.
6

• Project 211, aimed at creating one hundred top
  universities nationwide for twenty-first century
• Project 985, aimed at establishing top and high
  qualified universities in the world

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• higher education evaluation system established
• closer links between education, research and
  industries
• credit system introduced

8

• global spirits, international sources of faculty
  and students, and international research and
  teaching contents
• academic and research cooperation, joint
  institutes, exchanging students, and broadening
  international market of Chinese language teaching
  programs

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Driving Forces

• Economic globalization (international
  backgrounds)
• National economic growth (internal factors)
• Harmonious society and scientific view of
  development (internal factors)

10

• Within an era of increased global economic
  competition, and with the entrance of WTO,
  Chinese education is forced to open itself to
  outside world.
• More and more foreign students, entrepreneurs and
  experts become more interested in Chinese culture
  and market.

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• Deng proclaimed that Chinese education must face
  in three directions-toward modernization, the
  world, and the future.
• Expansion of higher education serving as a
  driving force of the economic growth.
• The growth of GDP also strengthened Chinese
  higher education.
• People have gradually recognized the significance
  of holding our own core technologies in
  maintaining a sustainable development.

12

• combining qualitative and quantitative
  improvements together
• synthesizing the development of education with
  economic and social developments
• balancing research and instruction both provided
  by higher education institutions
• harmonizing Chinese higher education with the
  international ones
• letting universities and colleges promote the
  ideas of autonomy, justice, equality, honesty,
  friendliness, peace, order and harmony between
  human being and the nature.

13

• science and technology as the first productivity
  and a major driving force behind the economic and
  social development
• unswervingly advocating and implementing the
  strategy of developing the nation by education

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Trends and Expectations

• deepening the reforming on teaching to further
  improve the quality of higher education
• improving teaching evaluation
• experimenting on new models of postgraduate
  education

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Trends and Expectations

• promoting the developments of high quality
  universities and Centers of Excellence
• strengthening the construction of universities as
  part of national creative system
• prospering social science and humanities by ways
  of project management, with more focus on urgent
  and significant social problems

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Hop Topics

• Education evaluations from governments
• Balancing the development of world-class
  universities and that of the non-world-class ones
• Ever increasing financial pressure on higher
  education
• University autonomy
• The follow-up issues evolved from quick higher
  education expansion

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Thank You!