Last year the University of Nottingham, which runs the oldest foreign branch campus in China, was approached by government officials from Shanghai asking if it would consider opening another location, this one 140 miles north of its undergraduate campus in Ningbo.
The project would involve a substantial donation by a wealthy Chinese philanthropist, along with a host of government perks, including enough land to support an enrollment of 4,000. In return, Shanghai municipal officials hoped Nottingham would build a research-oriented campus in Pudong, Shanghai’s major development zone. There, graduate students and professors could work on such subjects as drug development, stem-cell research, and regenerative medicine.
Nottingham agreed to the proposal, inspired by the belief, says Christine Ennew, pro vice chancellor for internationalization, that Chinese officials “see foreign involvement as a catalyst for change and a source of innovation.”
The Chinese government recognizes “the key role that higher education can play in social and economic development,” she says.
The Nottingham project, while driven by provincial-government officials, illustrates a broader central-government push to raise the caliber of higher education in China through deeper engagement with foreign universities.
Through speeches and policy papers, the Ministry of Education has made clear in recent years that it is unhappy with the widespread use of rote learning and narrowly defined academic programs at its universities. Last year it came out with a 10-year plan for educational reform that outlined what it viewed as the system’s deficiencies.
With China’s booming and increasingly modern economy as a backdrop, the plan proposed to introduce Western-style critical thinking and interdisciplinary work into the college curriculum, and expose students to other Western concepts, such as experiential learning and professional training. The government also wants to introduce more programs taught in English.
Foreign campuses are seen as a way to introduce such teaching strategies and inspire Chinese institutions to adopt similar methods and programs.
This emphasis on foreign engagement was described by Shen Yang, deputy director general of the ministry’s Department of International Cooperation and Exchange, in a speech in March.
“We want to welcome more high-caliber, world-class universities to come to China to participate in our development,” he said at the British Council’s annual conference, “Going Global,” in Hong Kong.
At the same time, ministry officials are deeply concerned about the proliferation of low-quality joint- and dual-degree programs between Chinese and foreign institutions, and are weeding out what they see as the bad actors. Those concerns were discussed at a conference last month at Xiamen University on the management of such ventures.
“They’re trying to bring some order to it,” says Gerard A. Postiglione, an education professor at the University of Hong Kong and an organizer of the conference. Dual- and joint-degree programs mushroomed in the past decade, expanding from 71 in 2001 to 579 this year, with more awaiting approval.
Complaints about shoddy teaching and high tuition have sparked a backlash against what some Chinese feel is the overly commercial approach some foreign providers have taken. The Chinese want to create new degree programs to build capacity, says Mr. Postiglione. “They feel others should have the same motivation.”
Pragmatic and Incremental
How exactly the government plans to both welcome more foreign campuses and crack down on shoddy foreign joint-degree programs is unclear. As with many government efforts in China, the broad goals are spelled out in official planning documents, but the details and specific strategies are opaque. The Ministry of Education indicated that an interview request from The Chronicle would not be considered, and individual officials stressed that they were unable to speak without permission.
The documents’ vagueness is typical of China’s “pragmatic and incremental” approach to policy making, says Patrick Horgan, the British Council’s China-programs director. National officials prefer “to allow certain things to happen that are consistent with policy goals but to retain sufficient regulatory discretion that those things can be stopped at any moment,” he explains. This indirect approach gives much of the initiative to lower-level officials.
As China looks to develop its economy, moving away from manufacturing toward high-tech industries, business and government leaders have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as the failure of the higher-education system to produce innovative thinkers.
Policy makers want to “find the factors that could be useful to facilitate creativity because of the knowledge economy, and because the gap with the Western economies is narrowing,” says Qiang Zha, an education professor at York University, in Canada, who spoke at the Xiamen conference. He criticized the opposition to lower-echelon joint degrees as too rigid. He thinks private-sector institutions should do more to meet mass-market vocational needs while elite public universities take responsibility for building capacity.
New York University and Duke University are also building campuses in China, in cooperation with local governments that have provided land and financial support. Like Nottingham, NYU is working with the Shanghai municipal government; its campus, scheduled to open in 2013, will be located in Pudong. Unlike Nottingham, it is building a liberal-arts college meant to draw as many as 3,000 students from around the world.
R. May Lee, associate vice chancellor for Asia at NYU, is heading the preparatory team. She says that while all direct negotiations were with Shanghai officials, “the Ministry of Education was always kept in the loop in the background.”
Shi Mingzheng, an expert on the history of foreign and private universities in China, is director of NYU’s Shanghai study-abroad program, based at East China Normal University. The NYU arrangement, he says, is typical of the interplay between central and local authorities. “The central government only plays the role of policy maker. They will approve or disapprove projects. They are not going to give a penny.”
Duke is building a different sort of campus in nearby Kunshan, a new industrial city up the Yangtze River Delta. Its emphasis will be on graduate and professional programs in areas including management, finance, and public health.
The ministry “looks at those two models and says, Yes, they are different, but we want both,” says Mr. Shi.
Projects tie into local development goals as well. Officials who throw funds and precious political capital into steering foreign branch campuses into existence will be looking to “get more from this than simply the creation of a joint campus,” says Mr. Horgan, of the British Council. They want “something that will serve as a beacon within their own provincial education system.”
For example, the Fengxian suburb of Pudong where the Nottingham campus will be located has made life-sciences research a high priority, says Nottingham’s Ms. Ennew.
Central to the Ministry of Education’s vision is the belief that branch campuses should provide a clear model that Chinese colleges can emulate in their own internal reforms.
Domestic universities should find a “good quality” foreign partner that can further their own development, says Zong Wa, executive director of the China Center for International Educational Exchange, an organization linked to the Ministry of Education that deals with international academic partnerships.
While Mr. Zong says the approval of foreign branch campuses is likely to be limited to “probably five to 10 in the next five years,” government officials will want as much variety as possible. “If the university is very strong in some area,” he says, “they are very welcome.”
Western Models, Not Ideas
Yet national officials are also selective and wary about borrowing from abroad. “China used to copy the method of the former Soviet Union, but that was a failure because each country is different,” says Zhang Yaoxue, director general of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, which advises China’s cabinet. (He emphasizes that he is speaking in a personal capacity.)
China’s invitations to foreign institutions serves its own development agenda and is not the result of a philosophical commitment to openness, says Mr. Horgan.
Still, Chinese universities have been engaging with foreign institutions ever since the Johns Hopkins University opened its Nanjing postgraduate-study center, in 1986.
According to the Ministry of Education, China has licensed 579 transnational higher-education programs at the bachelor’s level or higher. If study-abroad programs and other forms of nondegree academic exchanges are included, the total is at least 1,400. Business degrees are the most common joint ventures, followed by science and engineering.
Yet national officials are unimpressed with the quality of many of the partnerships, having just spent months doing an evaluation of them in four provinces, according to Wang Lisheng, deputy director of the ministry-affiliated China Academic Degrees and Graduate Education Development Center, in an interview in February. The ministry will be pondering the results soon.
Officials have concluded that Chinese universities gain little from partnerships that typically siphon students abroad to complete their bachelor’s degrees. Mr. Zong’s organization promotes 1+2+1 degree structures, in which students return to China for the final year of their program and faculty members coordinate course content with their foreign partners.
Other arrangements rob Chinese universities of higher-level students, he believes, because students spend their final year abroad.
“Actually Chinese universities play the role of community colleges—there is not really much articulation of the universities,” says Mr. Zong, adding that there is “some kind of benefit for the students, not really for the university.”
The message: Any foreign institutions applying to create joint programs must pay attention to how it will effect change inside the partner university. As Mr. Zha, of York, puts it, “What they want to see is what happens in a Western classroom, the same lively approach to knowledge, on Chinese soil.”
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