The Essential Characteristics of the Popularization of Chinese Higher Education

                  Wu Daxing

Now China is presenting an overall picture of vigorous development of massive higher education, the nature of which is the expansion of scale. Some may worry that the expanded scale of higher education would cause changes in the distribution of higher education resources. On the contrary, no such changes are likely to occur, neither within nor outside the universities. Therefore, if the political and economical systems are relatively stable, such expansion of scale would be the main reason both for major changes that a university must undertake to develop itself and for the reform a country must carry out to rationalize its university system. It is the expansion of scale, not simply the size of universities that decides whether and how universities should be reformed. I believe the theory of massive higher education is a theory of predictable trend—much more like a warning sign—but not a descriptive theory of what we have to achieve. Then what impact will be brought to those medium and small sized institutions by massive higher education? According to my observations, the answer falls into three aspects. First, maintaining the elites’ education is becoming the main stream of running universities, which will further widen the gap between institutions at different levels. Second, insuring education quality is brought into sharp focus of people’s attention. Third, China’s higher education is now faced with twists and turns of all kinds, which can be identified as five major challenges as follows: the mismatch between the expanded scale and education quality, the conflict between teaching conditions and teachers’ quality, the contradiction between teaching and research, the disproportion between undergraduate education and postgraduate education, the disconnection of university development from local economic development, and the dilemma of whether focusing on the development of single-discipline or on comprehensively multi-discipline faculties. To fend off these challenges, the only way-out is to encourage higher education institutions, especially medium and small ones, to compete in a fair environment. Following the trend of commercialization of higher education, many new market elements and concepts have come into being, and we have no choice but to take the road of market in running higher education institutions. Bearing in mind this basic situation, every institution shall find its right position and the nation’s higher education system must always be ready for market change and tailor itself to the demanding conditions in market.