Higher Education Reform in China

Higher Education Reform in China Higher Education Reform in China Kathryn Mohrman, Johns Hopkins University This report is the result of visits to Chinese university campuses in Spring 2003. As a Fulbright scholar I became interested in proposals for reform of Hong Kong higher education; that interest expanded to mainland universities as well. My focus was on key comprehensive universities, the best institutions in the country and ones under the direct control of the national Ministry of Education. I visited ten mainland universities, almost all of them are in the large urban centers of the east coast of China, government offices, and several education research institutes. I also interviewed individuals at several Hong Kong institutions. (The names of the universities and organizations visited and the categories of people interviewed are listed in the appendix.) On each campus I visited, I spoke with a variety of people, from undergraduate and postgraduate1 students to senior faculty and administrators. In all, I interviewed more than seventy individuals in a formal sense and several dozen more in classroom settings and informal situations.2 The formal appointments were usually made by my contact person on that campus and depended in many cases on that person’s network of colleagues. I speculate about the different impressions I might have taken away if I had happened to talk with a different six or ten people at a given university. My focus on key universities3 and urban universities has both strengths and weaknesses. These are the best institutions in the country, so I knowingly saw the top universities rather than a cross-section of Chinese higher education. Thus my observations are limited to one category of school—albeit the model for much of the rest of Chinese higher education. Everyone, it seems, wants to be more like Peking University or Fudan University, so learning more about those schools provides a sense of the direction that less famous institutions might pursue in the future. With almost 2000 universities in China, it would take much more than a semester or two of research to be able to say anything comprehensive about higher education reform more Kathryn Mohrman is Executive Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, an academic joint venture between Johns Hopkins and Nanjing Universities. She has been president of Colorado College, Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, Associate Dean of the College at Brown University, and other administrative positions. She has taught in both Hong Kong and Chengdu, Sichuan Province, PRC. 1 Chinese universities use the term “postgraduate” to describe what Americans call graduate students - master’s degree and PhD candidates. 2 In most cases, the individuals I interviewed had received a short written description of my research agenda outlining my interest in the following issues: *What do the leading comprehensive universities of China see as their strategic direction for the next three to five years? * What innovations are occurring on different campuses? What motivates these changes? * How are institutions dealing with dramatic growth in student demand and student enrollments? * What is the role for private universities? * What is happening with regard to academic exchange for students, professors, and university staff? How do these exchanges fit into the larger picture of institutional enhancement? * How is the undergraduate program changing? * What do the terms “liberal arts” and “general education” mean on your campus? 3 Key universities are the top 100 schools in China. In practical terms they are the equivalent of the Ivy League and the Big Ten combined. Traditionally the top three are Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan Universities, although all the institutions I visited are very competitive institutions. In the annual league tables (ranking system) released in early 2003, the campuses where I conducted my interviews are among the most highly rated of more than 1200 universities nationwide. Journal of the Washington Institute of China Studies, Fall 2006, Vol. 1, No. 2, p1-82 1 Higher Education Reform in China generally. Thus everything in this report should be read as “this is what I heard, saw, inferred” rather than “this is definitive.” I am mindful of the difficulties of a scholar from one culture seeking to understand the educational system of another. Although I speak some Chinese, all my interviews were conducted in English, either because the people I met were fluent in English or because I used a translator. All too often, however, people used familiar words but I sensed that those references had different meanings and implications in the Chinese context. What did I see and hear? What did I learn? Equally important, what did I not see and hear? I organize my observations around a series of trends — from regulation to greater autonomy, from teaching-only universities to an emphasis on research, from public provision of education to private players in the market, and so on. The current situation in China is quite fluid, however, with institutions arrayed along a continuum on each of the characteristics mentioned. Depending upon the topic under investigation, a given university might be highly centralized in one dimension while quite autonomous on other. And the rules are changing almost daily. Before presenting the results of my research, I need to say a word about the background (and prejudices) I bring to the task. I have been fortunate to have a variety of institutional experiences in my career—president of a private liberal arts college, dean at a public land-grant university, mid-level administrator in the Ivy League, policy analyst in Washington DC, national association executive, college trustee for more than a decade, and teacher and professor of students ranging from sixth grade to graduate study, mostly in the United States but also in China. Thus I bring perspectives that encompass both public and private institutions, domestic and international, curricular and student life dimensions, finance and personnel, governance and management. But throughout this report the reader will hear the American voice of an educator who comes from a background of institutional autonomy in a decentralized market-based system, a variety of institutional missions and structures, and significant freedom and mobility for students, faculty, and administrators. I try to be conscious of the values I bring to this task, but inevitably I have made assumptions and judgments that may say more about me than about China. THE CONTEXT FOR REFORM While China has a long history of education for leadership, it has only one century of experience with universities in the contemporary sense. Beginning with the founding of the forerunners of Tianjin, Jiaotong, and Peking Universities in the 1890s, China rapidly developed a system of colleges and universities in the twentieth century, many of them established by European and American missionaries.4 After the formation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, all of higher education was nationalized. A few institutions, such as Lingnan College in Guangzhou, left the mainland but 4 This brief historical summary draws upon many sources; in my opinion the best is Ruth Hayhoe, China’s Universities 1895- 1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict (Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, 1999). A good short summary of contemporary reform efforts is “Current Trends in Higher Education Development in China” by Min Weifang in International Higher Education (Center for International Higher Education at Boston College), Winter 2001. 2 Journal of the Washington Institute of China Studies, Fall 2006, Vol. 1, No. 2, p1-82 Higher Education Reform in China most remained under the new government. In 1952 the higher education system was reorganized along European/Soviet lines with a focus on specialized training to meet the needs of a developing society. Most research was assigned to special institutes, while universities concentrated on education of elite students with the highest scores on the national entrance examinations. The 1952 reforms also moved departments and even entire institutions from one location to another, while government ministries responsible for such functions as banking, highways, and health created their own specialized universities. After the decade of the Cultural Revolution in which virtually all educational activities ground to a halt, universities opened again in the 1970s, initially for workers, peasants, and soldiers or their children. Later in the decade the national examination system was reinstituted and Chinese higher education shifted from red (political criteria) to expert (academic achievement) once again. The policies and procedures of earlier years resumed—students were assigned to institutions and specific programs by the national government based on exam scores; graduates were assigned by government to lifetime jobs based on performance, social need, and connections; and the specialized nature of higher education continued. Reforms since the Cultural Revolution can be divided into those that come from outside of the higher education sector—the efforts to reduce the size of the Chinese bureaucracy, for example—and those that are initiated within the university system—instituting general education requirements. Similarly, one can look at reforms before Tiananmen Square with those that have happened subsequently and often in reaction to that event. In 1979, then-premier Deng Xiaoping acknowledged that China was far behind the west in many ways, including such fields as law, politics, and sociology. “We must catch up,” he declared. In fact, much of the academic reform in the following years involved the addition of programs as management, tourism, library science, and international economics to complement the already heavy emphasis on the sciences. As one long-time faculty member explained to me, this was evidence of the famous “make up” theory, although the management of universities continued under the state-planning model. Only later did the reform impetus come to the administrative side of higher education.

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