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Article Excerpt
Transnational higher education is a rapidly growing phenomenon that is under-researched and often even misunderstood. As the world's most promising market, China has the potential to dwarf all traditional offshore markets. Little research has been done to seriously analyse the fast growth in China. A sound understanding of the Chinese situation facilitates improvement of future provision of higher education by Australian universities, presently the most dominant force in China. This article incorporates Chinese and English literature, reviews the latest Chinese government documents, and delineates a comprehensive picture of transnational education provision in China. It locates the development in a wider social and policy context in China, examines the basic features of Chinese-foreign partnerships, and reveals some major issues of concern. It argues that China needs to form effective regulatory frameworks to govern this new development in higher education, especially in terms of quality assurance to ensure cultural appropriateness of the joint programs.
Keywords
transnational education
education markets
China
joint programs
higher education
international university cooperation
Introduction
The phrase 'transnational higher education', is increasingly used to describe exported education as an approach to international university cooperation but there remains a remarkable terminological and conceptual confusion over what transnational education means. According to the UNESCO and the Council of Europe (2001), it refers to education in which the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based: that is, any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another (McBurnie & Ziguras, 2007).While the international mobility of students is a well-established and growing feature of higher education, the transnational mobility of institutions and courses on a large scale is a novel phenomenon. During the past decade, the transnational provision of education has increased so dramatically that it is at the leading edge of the most fundamental change taking place in higher education today, evidencing the invisible hand of the market at work in allocating educational resources across borders efficiently. This is a new evolutionary phase within the global development of higher education in a context of the emerging international trade agreements for services, the opening of new education markets with insufficient capacity to meet the anticipated demands of citizens for advanced degrees, and the ever-present demand for college and universities to establish additional revenue streams.
Asia is the region with most active participation in transnational higher education (Huang, 2007).Within Asia, China and India are identified as the world's two most promising markets. China has been well documented as one of the world's largest education-importing countries, sending hundreds of thousands of students to study abroad. The Australian International Development Program estimates that total demand for tertiary education in China will rise from 8 million students in 2000 to 45 million in 2015 (Bohm, 2003; Marginson, 2004). China has, most recently, caught people's attention as a fast-growing receiver of students from overseas (Lasanowski & Verbik, 2007). Relatively few people have noticed the facts that transnational higher education is growing rapidly in China, and that China is increasingly significant and, given its size, has the potential to dwarf all traditional offshore markets. The fact that the development of for-profit and not-for-profit transnational institutions operating in an international education market is more akin to international business than traditional academic expansion is a phenomenon that has not always been well understood within the Chinese education circle. China is perhaps the world's most complex, overhyped, and under-analysed market for transnational higher education. Set in an international context, this article incorporates both Chinese and English literature, and reviews the latest Chinese government documents to delineate a comprehensive picture of the transnational higher education provision in China covering its policy context, major features and issues of concern.
The social and policy context
Transnational education emerged in China in the mid-1980s, experienced some adjustment from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, and revived after Deng Xiaoping's famous south tour in 1992. It has grown rapidly since China's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001. The development is a result of China's overall policy arrangements during recent decades of reforms. A few contextual factors have exerted direct impact on it. The first, and most fundamental, is the alignment of China's educational reforms with those in the economic sector. Since 1978, building up close links between education and the market has been the most prominent direction, together with decentralisation in finance and management in the reform of education. For the past two and a half decades, great efforts have been made to develop the function of the market in education. The role of the market has been particularly prominent in higher education, endorsed by the Decision on the Reform of the Educational Structure in 1985. As the market gained more significance in China, especially in the more developed coastal and urban areas, more substantial reform policies were introduced to make structural changes in education, including the Program for Education Reform and Development in China in 1993 and the Education Act of the People's Republic of China in 1995.
The second factor is a commercialisation of education that is related to and, indeed, an aspect of China's market-oriented reforms, reflecting radicalism in a pseudo-market. China's education policies are produced by economists to 'meet the needs of a socialist economy' (Lao, 2003). In 1992, the Decision on the Development of the Tertiary Industry stated clearly that education was part of tertiary industry and those who invested in it would own and benefit from it. The government raised the idea of education as a stimulus for economic growth in the Decision on Further Educational Reform to Promote Quality Education in 1999. Private investment on education was strongly encouraged. The Decision on Reform and Development of Basic Education in...
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