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External Higher Education Quality Assurance System in China
Liu Shuiyun
In the midst of worldwide expansion of higher education, diversification of student populations, and diminished unit expenditure, quality assurance has become a central concern of higher education in many countries, while globalization of education market and university ranking all add fuel to the move of formulating quality frameworks within and beyond national boundaries.
Chinese higher education has gradually changed its elitist nature since its birth a century ago and embarked on an internationally recognized path of massification. There has been a dramatic expansion of enrollment in higher education since the end of the 1990s. China currently has the largest higher education system in the world. In 2014, it had 2,529 accredited universities and colleges, with a total student enrollment of 25.5 million. Accompanying the rapid growth of the higher education system, its quality has become a central focus in China over the last decade. Based on continuous policy design and reforms, an array of external quality assessment schemes of higher education has been established, which were operated by governments alongside the third-party evaluation agencies and the market.
State-run higher education assessment schemes were formulated in China at three levels in the following sequence: undergraduate education, postgraduate education, and vocational education and private higher education. Undergraduate level assessment was first to conducted in China. From 1994 to 2001, three forms of quality assessment, quality accreditation, excellence assessment, and random assessment, were put into practice in China. The Ministry of Education (MOE) combined the three quality assessment schemes together and launched a new project in 2002, the Quality Assessment of Undergraduate Education. According to this project, all higher education institutions providing undergraduate education should be compulsorily evaluated within a five-year period on a rolling basis. The evaluation is on the institutional level. The MOE established the Higher Education Evaluation Centre (HEEC) to conduct quality evaluation. The first round of reviews from 2002 to 2008 evaluated 589 higher education institutions. The second round of reviews started from the end of 2010, and mainly focuses on those higher education institutions with newly established undergraduate programs that have not been evaluated before.
Besides the HEEC, which undertakes the evaluation of undergraduate programs, another governmental quality assessment agency that focuses on postgraduate education was also founded, namely, the China Academic Degrees & Graduate Education Development Centre (CDGDC). It is engaged in the accreditation of postgraduate degree–granting units, the approval of national key disciplines of priority, as well as the review and selection of excellent master’s and doctoral dissertations. Furthermore, the CDGDC initiated the Subject Evaluation program from 2002. The audit of vocational education and private institutions is conducted by the provincial accreditation committees. In 2008, the MOE launched the Project of Teaching Evaluation in Higher Vocational Education Institutions, which specified the evaluation procedures and indicators. The provinces are supposed to follow the project, design the detailed evaluation schemes, and operate the on-site evaluation. The MOE reserves the right to inspect the review processes of local governments.
Nongovernmental agencies have also engaged in higher education quality assessment in China since the 1990s, such as the Shanghai Agency for Education Evaluation and the Jiangsu Agency for Education Evaluation. They are qualified to undertake higher education quality assessment and accreditation with the delegation and assessment experts from the governments or the institutions. As governmental assessment agencies have engaged in almost all types of higher education evaluation, few opportunities have been left for these nongovernmental accreditation agencies to work alone or participate in any official evaluation schemes (Li 2004). Paralleling the formal quality assessment schemes, university rankings have also exercised considerable influence on the assessment of higher education institutions in China. They have been published since the end of the 1980s, mainly by for-profit educational companies, such as Netbig and the China University Alumni Association, while some research institutes also embraced the market. The rankings are very popular with the public, especially with the potential students and their parents.
To sum up, the developments of higher education in China over a quarter of a century have resulted in an array of external quality assurance schemes for higher education operated by governments, the third-party evaluation agencies and the market. Among them, the state is the leading actor and quality assessment is the dominant form. Yet, the higher education quality assessment mechanisms in China, which functioned over a decade, have both gained recognition and invited criticism. Some critics argued that the external quality assessment has not contributed to the improvement of quality in higher education. In this context, it is necessary to examine what measures have been implemented in China to ensure the higher education quality, and the extent to which these external quality assurance schemes have fulfilled the role of transforming the higher education institutions. It is expected that the experience drawn from the Chinese practices could be extended to other contexts, including Asian economies and the global South.
This issue includes eight journal articles published recently (2012–2015) from the top Chinese educational research journals, such as Educational Research, Journal of Higher Education, and Fudan Education Forum. Most of the authors are renowned educational researchers from higher education institutions funded by the “985 Project”1 and the experts from the evaluation agencies of MOE. These papers cover different evaluation schemes, such as the quality evaluation of undergraduate education, postgraduate education evaluation, and vocational evaluation. A variety of research perspectives are adopted, including theoretical analysis, empirical study of the evaluation efficiency, and exploration of value orientations, and international comparison studies.
The first selected article is offered by Prof. Zhang Yingqiang, Dean of the School of Education, Huazhong University of Science of Technology and Su Yongjian, a doctoral student there. This article examines the quality assurance system from a theoretical perspective. They critically reflect the traditional higher education quality assurance system from three angles. First, they regard higher education quality assurance as an ideology, and accountability is believed to be its key mission. The accountability schemes have eroded traditional professional autonomy and trust on higher education institutions. In this regard, higher education institutions gained legitimacy from external world but lost their own rationality. Second, they also see higher education quality assurance as a technology, which helps to measure and assess the quality of higher education. However, relying too much on quality assessment technology has made technology replace the purpose. Quality is then no longer regarded as a question of what it actually is, but something can be managed and measured. Third, they also take higher education quality assurance as a kind of power. Higher education institutions have to respond to various external requirements, which caused the academic tribes to be colonized. Based on the critical reflections on the traditional quality assurance schemes, Zhang and Su suggest that a holistic quality culture should be established. The new quality culture should be based on mutual trust among various stakeholders.
The second, third and fourth papers focus on a specific quality assessment scheme in China (i.e., the quality assessment of undergraduate education [QAUE]), one of the most influential state-run quality assessment schemes in China. The second paper is written by Liu Xianjun, Zhang Junchao, Wei Shuguang, and Ding Ling, professors from the School of Education, Huazhong University of Science of Technology, and Professor Yu Yang from Jilin University. They examine the effectiveness of the first-round of QAUE from 2003–2008. Based on a large-scale empirical study, the research group found that that QAUE has considerably pushed the evaluated institutions to improve their quality. For example, they have emphasized the role of undergraduate teaching, actively developed special characteristics of the institutions, improved their infrastructure, teaching facilities, and the quality of teaching staff, and also enhanced teaching management and internal quality assurance. QAUE has also caused some unexpected problems. For example, using the uniform evaluation criteria has led to the homogenization of higher education institutions, the role of provincial governments has been neglected, and the procedure of follow-up reforms has not been emphasized sufficiently. Based on the efficiency evaluation, the research team proposes some suggestions to improve the Chinese higher education quality assessment system.
The third paper by Professor Zhou Guangli from Renmin University of China. He takes QAUE as an example to examine the efficiency of Chinese higher education quality assurance system. The first round of the QAUE was recognized as being moderately effective, and left great room for improvement. According to the operational mechanism, the authors regard the QAUE as a state-run accountability system for higher education institutions. This is one kind of administrative accountability schemes led by the government, which is not believed to be effective in reality. Prof. Zhou also realizes that the external quality assessment purely organized by the nongovernment agencies is not possible in the current circumstances, because of the immature civil society in China. Thus, he suggests that China should move from the existing administrative accountability scheme to a social accountability scheme, where the involvements of both internal and external interest groups of higher education are encouraged. This scheme could be coordinated by the governments but organized by the governmental and nongovernmental agencies together. The social accountability scheme is believed to be able to fully mobilize the enthusiasm and initiatives of higher education stakeholders to participate in the supervision of colleges and universities. The author believes that this is the only way to enhance the effectiveness of Chinese higher education quality assessment system.
The fourth paper is written by Professor Zhong Binglin, the former president and an educational researcher from Beijing Normal University. He analyzed the Qualification Evaluation results of the newly established colleges (i.e., the second round of the QUAE) and described the development situation of Chinese undergraduate education programs with short history. The result analysis shows that the newly established colleges perform well in the dimensions of learning atmosphere construction and student training, and teaching quality. The evaluated colleges tend to be qualified in these two evaluation indicators. In contrast, most of the evaluated colleges are unqualified in the following evaluation indicators: the structure of teaching staff, university-industry collaboration education, specialty setup and structure adjustment, quality control, cultivation and training of teachers. In this regard, Zhong suggests that the newly established colleges in China should make efforts to optimize the structure of teaching staff. They also need to reform their mode of student training and to explore the methods of student training through university-industry collaboration. The newly established colleges should enhance the specialty construction and reforms, to meet the needs of economic and social development. In addition, the internal quality monitoring mechanisms in these newly established colleges should be improved to assure education quality. The feasible ways of teacher cultivation and training in the newly established colleges, especially in the private ones, should be further developed as well.
The fifth paper is offered by Dr. Wang Yonglin from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Professor Wang Zhanjun from Beijing Institute of Technology. They concentrate on the vocational education evaluation. Based on the content analysis of two evaluation projects conducted in 2004 and 2008, they analyzed the value orientations of the quality evaluation of higher vocational education in China. They find that the higher vocational education evaluation in China intend to push the evaluated institutions to enhance quality awareness, establish their quality standards, emphasize the role of teaching, and highlight the characteristics of institutions. The value orientations have been altered from time to time to adapt to the changing external environments. They also indicate that the value orientations in Chinese higher vocational educational evaluation are not appropriate enough, as the evaluation started late and developed quite rapidly with less experience accumulation. Thus, they suggest that some of the value orientations should be further adjusted. For example, the implicit factors influencing educational quality should be emphasized; the participation of the evaluated institutions in the evaluation should be enhanced; the governance, management, and evaluation of higher vocational education should be separated; the quality monitoring should become normal, continuous, and dynamic.
The sixth paper focuses on the evaluation of postgraduate education, which is offered by Lin Mengquan from CDGDC, Chang Kai from Fuzhou University, and Gong Le from Tianjin University. They examine the higher education quality assurance systems in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States from an international comparison perspective, and draws the experiences for the quality evaluation of Chinese postgraduate education to learn. They find that the designs of higher education quality assurance systems in various national contexts are influenced by the higher education systems, traditional culture and social backgrounds there. The clearly defined and harmonious relationships of responsibility, rights and interests between various stakeholders in quality assurance are the pre-condition for the quality assurance mechanisms to effectively run in these countries. Furthermore, they also find that the model combining both internal and external quality assurance, while giving priority to the self-evaluation of higher education institutions is the future tendency of higher education quality assurance development. In the context of higher education globalization and internationalization, the quality assurance mechanisms also tend to be internationalized. Referring to the experiences learning from the quality assurance systems in the three countries, the authors propose some suggestions for improving the Chinese quality assurance of postgraduate education.
The seventh paper is offered by Professor Wang Zhanjun from Beijing Institute of Technology and two doctoral students from Tsinghua University, Qiao Weifeng and Li Jiangbo. They introduce a new higher education quality assessment technology, monitoring evaluation. Higher education monitoring evaluation is defined as a process that uses modern information technology to continually collect and deeply analyze relevant data, visually present the status of higher education, and provide objective basis for value judgments and scientific decision making. The authors emphasize that monitoring evaluation is a data-intensive evaluation. The temporal scale is intensive, the spatial scale is diverse, and the value scale is multiple. The usage of monitoring aims to provide promote feedback for continuous quality improvement, to follow the systematic change of higher education for scientific decision-making, to deliver user-oriented information service for diverse value judgments. The technology of higher education monitoring evaluation includes data collection and consolidation, data mining and analysis, and data visualization. The authors believe that the emergence of monitoring evaluation is a result of rapid development of information technology, which meets the needs of higher education system changes and governance adjustments. Monitoring evaluation was also initiated in China. HEEC has established the database of basic status of undergraduate education, to provide support for the second-round of QAUE.
The last paper is by Dr. Qu Xia and Yang Xiaotong from Renmin University. The authors describe the research situation of Chinese higher education quality in the last 15 years. A total of 1,048 academic papers about higher education quality selected from a key Chinese social science research database (CSSCI) are analyzed. A keyword co-occurrence knowledge mapping is made by using CiteSpace and the main research topics and their evolution tendency in this field are outlined. The further analysis shows that Chinese higher education quality research is highly influenced by the national education reform policies, and there is a good interaction between research and policy. The release of national educational policies would stimulate the emergence of new research topics, and the academic discussions about the educational reforms will further facilitate the improvement of the related policies. Apart from the policy discussions of higher education quality, the main research topics include quality views of mass higher education, teaching management of higher education institutions, student cultivation, and higher education quality assurance and evaluation. The issue of quality assurance and evaluation is always the research focus in this field. The issues of teaching management and student cultivation have emerged recently and might become the future hot topics. However, the related research tends to be superficial, and thus deeper and more feasible research about these topics is particularly needed in China.
These eight articles are the most representative research findings about Chinese higher education quality assurance, published recently. The various evaluation schemes are discussed, including quality assessment of undergraduate education, quality evaluation of higher vocational education and quality assurance of postgraduate education. They discussed the achievements these evaluation schemes have gained, and the problems and challenges they have to face. The existing quality assurance mechanisms are reflected, based on theoretical analysis and empirical studies. The international experience is referred. Some suggestions are also proposed to improve the current mechanisms, including establishing new quality culture, shifting the value orientation behind the quality assessment designs, adopting social accountability schemes to replace the administrative ones, using the new evaluation technology such as monitoring evaluation, and establishing a combination model of internal and external quality assurance schemes. On the whole, the analysis of the existing evaluation schemes and the suggestions for the future development made in the eight papers shows a changing trend in the field of Chinese higher education quality assurance from emphasizing quality evaluation to concerning about quality improvement. Although establishing a better quality assurance system is always a research focus of this field, as found by Qu and Yang in the last paper, nowadays researchers paid more attention to essential quality improvement, especially the improvement o...
