Education, Careers & Professional News
Education Equality Calls For Quality Education
CHINA: Every year college enrolment time brings many controversies and stories.
Rising tuition fees, the chances of poverty-stricken students entering colleges, enrolment corruption, regional equality of enrolment, curriculum reforms - all are themes of vigorous public debate.
For a country with a 1.3 billion population and relatively limited
higher education resources, understandably there is much room for debate and improvement in the higher education sector.
It is important that such discussions are encouraged so that solutions can be found to existing problems. Even for problems that cannot be solved instantly, such public discussions are conducive to the long-term improvement of the country`s higher education system.
A topic of hot debate is the regional equality of the country`s college enrolment.
China`s colleges are mostly publicly invested, with some key national universities, such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, financed by the central government, with the others mainly funded by local governments.
The Ministry of Education sets quotas for these key colleges and universities concerning how many students they should enrol from different regions. They are entitled to make small adjustments to the quota plan.
The issue of regional equality arises from the fact that many of the high-quality national universities financed by the central government admit a large proportion of students from where they are located, putting applicants from other regions at a “disadvantage.”
At Peking University, for example, students from Beijing will account for about 18 per cent of the total this year, according to its main campus enrolment plan.
One result of this enrolment imbalance is that candidates in Beijing can be admitted into Peking University with marks relatively lower than that of students from other regions.
Some people argue that since these national universities are financed by central government funds, or taxation paid by people from all regions, they should not favour local candidates. By not doing so, they are damaging educational equality.
Proponents of the differentiated enrolment policy argue that these universities have received various policy supports from local governments and it is justifiable for them to offer preferential terms to local applicants.
Both arguments hold water, since this is a complicated question with no easy answers.
It is a practice in many countries to favour, to a varied extent, local candidates in the enrolment programmes of colleges and universities. In China`s case, these top national universities are mostly located in economically prosperous regions, where local taxpayers contribute relatively more to the central government`s revenues.
On the other hand, since the country`s college enrolment is mainly based on the marks applicants achieve in the national examinations, the region-based selective enrolment policy would lead to the scenario that some students with lesser marks can enter the top universities while others who get higher marks cannot.
Admittedly, given China`s unbalanced educational levels among different regions, the enrolment of a top national university cannot be equally split among different regions if it is to pick the best students. But an excessive preferential policy does not contribute to equality, either.
A long-term solution would lie in the improvement of China`s overall higher education system, in which more colleges and universities can offer quality services and compete with those top national ones.
In this way, students would have more choices and educational equality would be better achieved