Tuesday, August 21, 2018

China's World-Class Universities

China has invested a great deal of resources in higher education by providing more domestic opportunity as well as sending Chinese students abroad for study. China intends to create World-Class Universities (WCU) that will compete with other universities around the world, however, efforts are focused more on science and technology than on humanities.

One of the significant positive influences as China seeks to establish world-class universities is the Belt and Road Initiative (RBI), which will connect Chinese citizens across cities and territories and enhance economic opportunity. While RBI connects, enhancing educational opportunity will build human capacity to meet the demands of this growing and connected economy.

One challenge for the WCU initiative is the ideological conformity to governmental dogma in Chinese universities. The second challenge is quality related to domestic versus international study. The author of the referenced essay noted that, "Chinese universities can only enter the 'first world' if there is significant development of domestic graduate education and corresponding stature for it as a result of policy actions. Currently, the fact that elite universities are exporting their best trained undergraduates to American and UK graduate schools and pushing those with domestic PhDs to less prestigious national universities is relaying the message that 'Chinese universities are not your first, or best choice.'"

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