Massification and Diversification of Higher Education in China : An Exploration of State, Market and Institutional Forces

From a fragile economy in the late 1970s, China overtook other major economies and became the world’s second largest in 2010, next only to the United States. China’s economic growth has strong implications for higher education, vital for creating human capital and technological innovations to support an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Since the late 1990s, Chinese higher education struck the world with its amazing pace of expansion, with the aggregate enrolment growing at an annual rate of 17 percent between 1998 and 2010. In 2007, the Chinese higher education system surpassed the American system in terms of enrolment size and became the world’s largest. Against this backdrop, this book sheds light on the structural characteristics of Chinese higher education from the perspective of institutional differentiation and diversity. For this purpose, this book provides an insightful lens instrumental in capturing the forces and factors behind the scene of differentiation and diversity in the Chinese system, and an updated classification scheme of Chinese universities and colleges. These are not yet seen in any other literature in the field.