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The University of California system has incurred a shortfall of more than US$800 million in its budget. Consequently, the system recommended a 15 percent increase in in-state undergraduate tuition for both spring and fall quarters of 2010, which is on top of a 9.3 percent raise in May 2009. In the meantime, UC faculty members would face an 8 percent reduction in salary. Similar woes have happened to almost all U.S. universities.
Contrary to this miserable scenario, institutions of higher education on the other side of the Pacific have seen their financial situation improving despite the crisis. Hao Ping, China’s vice minister of education, announced this at a news conference to showcase educational achievements on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Hao indicated that in 2007 the 34 Chinese universities identified as the frontrunners of the 985 Program – a project to raise Chinese universities to international standard – received an average of 700 million yuan (US$92 million) for scientific research, with several as high as 1.2 billion yuan (US$132 million).
This amount was said to be on par with the average level of the 62 leading North American public and private research universities affiliated with the Association for American Universities, and that of Australia’s Group of Eight universities.
The 985 Program was launched to commemorate a speech by Jiang Zemin, then Chinese president, in May 1998 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Peking University. Jiang called for the elevation of some Chinese universities to world class.
The increasing investment thereafter, according to Hao, has led to the rising capability in scientific research in Chinese universities which, as a whole, have ranked fifth as measured by the number of papers published in journals cataloged by the Science Citation Index. China is behind only the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
In particular, in 2007, on average, Peking, Tsinghua, Zhejiang and Shanghai Jiaotong universities published 2,300 SCI papers, higher than the University of Sydney of the Group of Eight. Although these universities still lagged behind such elite U.S. ones as Harvard, MIT and Yale, which published an average of 2,700 papers, the gap has been significantly narrowed.
When the 985 Program debuted, the total number of papers published by the 34 leading Chinese universities was only 2,000, slightly more than those by Harvard University alone.
Yet Chinese universities have not experienced a quality improvement commensurate to the quantitative expansion. Vice Minister Hao did not compare citations to papers published by scientists at the Chinese and U.S. universities, but there is no doubt that Chinese papers fall behind by this measure.
It also is common that graduates from the 985 Program universities, especially those in science and engineering disciplines, still prefer foreign graduate schools – from the schools affiliated to the Association of American Universities and the Group of Eight Universities – to their alma maters for advanced studies.
The occurrence of academic scandals at some of the most prestigious Chinese universities has not been seriously tackled.
More critically, as scholar-turned-bureaucrats, Chinese university presidents are more willing to conform to the political leadership than to behave professionally as their foreign counterparts.
In the words of Qian Xuesen, the “father” of China’s missile and space programs, one important reason that China has not turned out outstanding talent is that the nation does not have one university that genuinely follows the model of nurturing scientific and creative talent and encouraging unique innovation.
While the diagnostics are harsh, the fact of the matter is that until this problem is solved, Chinese universities are unlikely to join the world’s “premium league” of higher education, regardless how many papers they produce.
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(Cong Cao is a senior research associate with the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce at the State University of New York. He received his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1997 and has worked at the University of Oregon and the National University of Singapore. Dr. Cao is interested in the social studies of science and technology with a focus on China. ©Copyright Cong Cao.)
