The Challenges of Chinese-Foreign Cooperative Education – A Qualitative Analysis from Cooperative Institutions

Chinese-foreign cooperative education is an important form of internationalization of China’s higher education, through which China realizes the optimization and redistribution of higher education resources and promotes the development of its higher education. Since China’s reform and opening up, the internationalization of Chinese higher education has developed rapidly. In recent years, the number of Chinese-foreign cooperative education institutions in China has been increasing, and the number of students and colleges and universities involved has also been increasing, but in the process of rapid growth, it is also facing some new problems and challenges. This study will take a qualitative research approach to conduct in-depth interviews with a Chinese-foreign cooperative institution which has more than 20 years of running school experience. Through in-depth interviews with 20 participants, including senior managers, lecturers and students, we found out the challenges that Chinese-foreign cooperative institutions are facing, explore the reasons for these challenges, and then put forward corresponding countermeasures. Through the study, we found that Chinese-foreign cooperative education organizations are mainly facing challenges from two aspects: cooperative in running schools ,and the teaching and learning adaptability, which affect the development process of Chinese-foreign cooperative education. This study provides useful suggestions for Chinese-foreign cooperative education institutions through deeply interviews and literature analysis. Chinese-foreign cooperative education institutions can actively deal with the challenges faced in running schools by reducing homogeneous enrollment competition, adjusting and optimizing the direction of professional settings, improving the management level of the institution. The strategies of improve of the teaching and learning adaptability can be adjusting the configuration of faculty structure, jointing global recruitment and multi-channel cooperation and exchange, etc.