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Institutions of higher learning in China have become big business according to a Chinese professor's recently published book. Although the number of Ph.D. candidates in China has increased dramatically, educational quality and research standards are declining, it says.
Professor Zhou Guangli’s “Chinese Ph.D. Quality Survey” points out several flaws in the system. He is affiliated with the Central China Institute of Educational Science at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The most severe problem seems to be the ratio of Ph.D. supervisors to students.
Another consideration is that numerous “professors” are nothing more than Chinese Communist Party cadres that the Party has appointed to these positions.
Forty-six percent of supervisors are responsible for seven Ph.D. candidates at a time. In extreme instances, a professor supervises as many as 47 Ph.D. candidates. About 13 percent of the students have only one monthly opportunity to consult about their research with their supervisor; three percent have to get along without any discussions.
China replaced the United States in 2008 to become the world’s top producer of Ph.D. title-holders. China's output of Ph.D. candidates increased 4.56 fold between 1999 and 2006, and went from 54,000 in 1999 to 246,630 in 2009, according to state media.
Xu Yin, a former associate professor at Tsinghua University, commented in an interview with Sound of Hope Radio that the Ph.D. candidate supervisors are only familiar with specific fields of academia, and that as such it is impossible for those who supervise 20 students or more to be familiar with each Ph.D. candidate's field of research. “They put the burden of a heavy work load onto the students.”Given these circumstances, discussions between the supervisor and the students have been reduced to nothing more than checking progress of the students’ research project, Xu explained. “Ph.D. students and master students are reduced to being intelligent slaves, working for their supervisor.
“The supervisor spends all his/her effort to procure funding for research projects and then passes those projects on to the students. Research results are published under the supervisor’s name, even though he knows nothing about the project. Certain supervisors could publish many articles from different areas of specialization in one year, when in reality the research results belong to the students.”
Xu blames the reforms to the Chinese educational system that began in 1998, with overly emphasized a utilitarian approach, leading to the current crisis.
According to Chinese social economist He Qinglian, the essence of China’s educational system reform is the commercialization of education: “It pushes the responsibility of public education and the funding of public education onto everyday people, a task the government is supposed to shoulder, and makes education into a profitable industry,” Ms. He said in an interview with New Tang Dynasty Television.
Xu commented that academic research in mainland China is like doing business: “It has been operated as an enterprise, a profitable industry; although there are not enough teachers, student recruitment is expanding. As far as I know, it is not uncommon to have one instructor teaching 500 students in a class in some university; it is absolutely ridiculous.”
An inevitable result, Xu said, is that the quality of academic education in China, and the reputation of its higher education, suffers.
Read the original Chinese article.
