Author Topic: Education Reform in the 21st Century in the People's Republic of China  (Read 3212 times)

Offline iram

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:: Education Reform in the 21st Century  in the People's Republic of China

Two years before the dawn of the 21st Century the Chinese government proposed an ambitious plan intended to expand university enrollment to ensure a greater output of professional and specialized graduates. An adjunct to the plan aimed to develop an elite of world class universities. Restructuring, through consolidations, mergers and shifts among the authorities which supervise institutions, was aimed at addressing the problems of small size and low efficiency. Higher vocational education was also restructured, and there was a general tendency there to emphasize elite institutions. This rapid expansion of mass higher education has resulted in not only a strain in teaching resources but also in higher unemployment rates among graduates. The creation of private universities, not under governmental control, remains slow and its future uncertain. The restructuring of higher education, in the words of one academic "has created a clearly escalating social stratification pattern among institutions, stratified by geography, source of funding, administrative unit, as well as by functional category (e.g., comprehensive, law, medical, etc.)."[2] Thus, although recent reform has arguably improved over-all educational quality, they have created new, different issues of equity and efficiency that will need to be addressed as the century proceeds.

In the spring 2007 China will conduct a national evaluation of its universities. The results of this evaluation will be used to support the next major planned policy initiative. The last substantial national evaluation of universities, which was undertaken in 1994, resulted in the 'massification' of higher education as well as a renewed emphasis on elite institutions.[3] Academics praised the fin du siècle reforms for budging China's higher education from a unified, centralized, closed and static system into one characterized by more diversification, decentralization, openess and dynamism, stimulating the involvement of local governments and other non-state sectors. At the same time they note that this decentralization and marketization has led to further inequality in educational opportunity.[4]