External Higher Education Quality Assurance System in China

In the midst of worldwide expansion of higher education, diversification of student populations, and diminished unit expenditure, quality assurance has become a central concern of higher education in many countries, while globalization of education market and university ranking all add fuel to the move of formulating quality frameworks within and beyond national boundaries.Chinese higher education has gradually changed its elitist nature since its birth a century ago and embarked on an internationally recognized path of massification.There has been a dramatic expansion of enrollment in higher education since the end of the 1990s.China currently has the largest higher education system in the world.In 2014, it had 2,529 accredited universities and colleges, with a total student enrollment of 25.5 million.Accompanying the rapid growth of the higher education system, its quality has become a central focus in China over the last decade.Based on continuous policy design and reforms, an array of external quality assessment schemes of higher education has been established, which were operated by governments alongside the third-party evaluation agencies and the market.State-run higher education assessment schemes were formulated in China at three levels in the following sequence: undergraduate education, postgraduate education, and vocational education and private higher education.Undergraduate level assessment was first to conducted in China.From 1994 to 2001, three forms of quality assessment, quality accreditation, excellence assessment, and random assessment, were put into practice in China.The Ministry of Education (MOE) combined the three quality assessment schemes together and launched a new project in 2002, the Quality Assessment of Undergraduate Education.According to this project, all higher education institutions providing undergraduate education should be compulsorily evaluated within a five-year period on a rolling basis.The evaluation is on the institutional level.The MOE established the Higher Education Evaluation Centre (HEEC) to conduct quality evaluation.The first round of reviews from 2002 to 2008 evaluated 589 higher education institutions.The second round of reviews started from the end of 2010, and mainly focuses on those higher education institutions with newly established undergraduate programs that have not been evaluated before.Besides the HEEC, which undertakes the evaluation of undergraduate programs, another governmental quality assessment agency that focuses on postgraduate education was also founded, namely, the China Academic