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Cost Sharing in China’s Higher Education: Analyses of Major Stakeholders

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Higher Education in the BRICS Countries

Part of the book series: Higher Education Dynamics ((HEDY,volume 44))

Abstract

With changed relationships between society, the market, and universities, stakeholders have penetrated China’s traditional monopolistic relationships between the state and public higher education institutions, with the role of external actors becoming far more important during the last few decades in influencing internal affairs of individual higher education institutions. As the proportion of governmental sources for higher education (in relation to GDP) shrinks year by year, the share of students and their families has been increasing significantly. Alongside China’s developmental paths/models there have been changes of university governance modes as well, which have led to changed relationships among stakeholders with different winners and losers created each time. This chapter focuses on the three most significant stakeholders in Chinese higher education: governments, students and their families, and the business community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, the percentage of students in higher education from workers and peasant families increased from 20.5 % in 1952 to 55.28 % in 1958, and reached 71.2 % in 1976 (Ma and Gao 1998). As reported by Chen and Le (2012), students from rural background at Peking University were over 30 % in 1972, remained between 15 and 20 % in the 1980s, and only occupied slightly over 10 % during the 1990s. It is widely acknowledged that China’s contemporary higher education contributes to social and educational inequalities (Zhao 2005).

  2. 2.

    A variation on this theme is that students alleged to be taking more years and/or more courses than are necessary or even useful merely or largely because the courses and sometimes even the living expenses are free of charge.

  3. 3.

    It is important to point out that the Chinese government has selected a handful of institutions to invest focally. Typical examples are national initiatives such as Projects 211 and 985. The first is a constructive project of nearly 100 universities and disciplines in the twenty first century conducted by the government of China aiming at cultivating high-level talents for national economic and social development strategies starting from the mid-1990s. The second is another constructive project, to some extent based on the first, for founding world-class universities in the twenty first century by the Chinese government of China, reflecting a conscious strategy to concentrate resources on a handful of institutions with the greatest potential for success in the international academic marketplace. For those chosen ones, funding is a very different story. This policy has understandably caused much resentment among most institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Division of Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Education, University of Hong Kong, Room 418, Runme Shaw Building, Hong Kong, China

    Prof. Rui Yang

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  1. Prof. Rui Yang
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Correspondence to Rui Yang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Studies on Labor & Society, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Simon Schwartzman

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Oslo, Kristiansand S., Norway

    Rómulo Pinheiro

  3. University of Witwatersrand Grad. School of Public & Development, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Pundy Pillay

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Yang, R. (2015). Cost Sharing in China’s Higher Education: Analyses of Major Stakeholders. In: Schwartzman, S., Pinheiro, R., Pillay, P. (eds) Higher Education in the BRICS Countries. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9570-8_12

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