Books in the Emerging Perspectives on Education in China series

In 1989, China started charging tuition on a very small scale at a number of universities as a result of the global trend of cost-recovery policies, thus ending the free higher education era in China. It was not until 1997 that all higher education institutions in China started charging tuition and fees. Both the expansion of higher education and the wide gap between income and tuition and fees have created an increasingly high proportion of students who are academically qualified but cannot afford to go to college. To address the problem of the increasing number of financially needy students, in 1999, China launched the pilot Government-subsidized Student Loan Program (GSSLP) in eight cities. This program was extended to full-time students at all of the 1,942 public higher education institutions in 2000, and has been undergoing revisions ever since, including major ones in 2004 and 2007. As of 2009, the number of financially needy students in China reached 5.27 million, accounting for 23.06 percent of the total enrollment of 22.85 million at higher education institutions in China. Behind those statistics are young people who suffer in many ways. This book provides multiple perspectives, namely, global, comparative, empirical, practical and philosophical ones, on the GSSLP, the largest financial aid program in current China. It not only provides information on financial aid policies, especially the GSSLP, in China, but also offers a comparative perspective by examining student loan programs in the United States and Australia, which are more mature and better developed. Using original dataset, the empirical and practical perspectives examine the effect of the GSSLP on students' behavior, and look into the different aspects of the GSSLP, including students' perceptions of and attitudes toward the program, as well as its implementation. In addition to these technical aspects of the GSSLP, this book also examines the larger concepts of equality and social justice from a philosophical perspective, and argues that education can potentially play a significant role in realizing true equality by changing the self-interest-maximizing social ethos into an egalitarianism-oriented social mentality.

Higher Education as a Field of Study in China: Defining Knowledge and Curriculum Structure concerns the complexity of higher education as an academic field_the evolving nature of the field in light of the overall development of higher education in China. It reviews how higher education as a field of study has evolved in China since 1978 and how the field has been shaped by political and social forces, as well as institutional culture. Xin Wang argues that higher education is becoming an interdisciplinary field rather than a subfield under the discipline of education, especially when higher education has become an enterprise with such a broad scope in China. Wang also expresses a belief that the field of higher education is being challenged by the professional need for preparing and training competent professionals for various administrative positions in China. Higher education as a field will be professionalized with its own knowledge base and a set of skills in applying this knowledge to practical areas. This book also provides an account of the U.S. model of higher education as an example_how the field was formed and developed, how it has evolved from a generalized area of inquiry into a professional specialization, how programs of higher education are structured, what classes they offer, and what challenges they face. The U.S. model presents a comparative perspective for Chinese scholars and program directors about higher education as a field of study.

Educational researchers have long been concerned about the factors that influence the patterns of attendance in higher education and the extent to which higher education has been accessible to all students regardless of their socioeconomic status. Extensive research has indicated that a variety of class-related factors, such as cultural capital, social capital, and economic capital, exert remarkable impacts on the amount and type of education that one receives. Drawing on cultural capital theory, this study aims at analyzing how students' college choice process varies by social class in China. By exploring different cultural and financial factors that influence different stages of students' college choice process, this study hopes to contribute to identifying the most appropriate policies and practices for raising the representation of students from the lowest social class among college participants.

Presents the schooling context for Tibetan students who migrated from Tibet Autonomous Region to Neidi temporarily for special educational support to Tibet by the State government. This work shows that the ethnic identity constructed by Tibetan students has, to a large extent, meet the state government's political and economic interests.

Becoming a Model Minority: Schooling Experiences of Ethnic Koreans in China looks at the manner in which ethnic Korean students construct self-perception out of the model minority stereotype in their school and lives in Northeast China. It also examines how this self-perception impacts the strength of the model minority stereotype in their attitudes toward school and strategies for success. Fang Gao shows how this stereotype tends to obscure significant barriers to scholastic success suffered by Korean students, as well as how it silences the disadvantages faced by Korean schooling in China's reform period and neglects the importance of multiculturalism and racial equality under the context of a harmonious society.