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This paper examines the development in China of junior colleges (JCs) and adult higher education institutions (HEIs) and compares them to their community college counterparts in the United States, focusing on what China can learn from the American experience. It notes that higher education in China has expanded rapidly in recent years, with the number of colleges and universities more than doubling between 1977 and 1995 and enrollment increasing by a factor of five. According to the Ninth Five-Plan for Educational Development and the Long Range Development Program Toward the Year 2010, enrollment is expected to increase from 2.57 million students in 1995 to 4.5 million in 2010. To accommodate the increase, the Chinese government does not plan to expand the number of institutions but rather have the JCs and HEIs expand their current scale of operations by increasing enrollment. It is recommended that the Chinese government establish specific policy guidelines for further developing JCs and HEIs, that educational leaders be granted more autonomy to operate their institutions, that JCs and HEIs consider more open admissions policies, articulate transfer arrangements between JCs and HEIs and four-year institutions, and ensure that JCs and HEIs are properly funded. (Contains 11 references.) (MDM)

Dramatic enrollment expansion at the undergraduate level and institutional diversification are characteristics frequently used to describe major trends in China's massive higher education system. A less understood phenomenon is the relatively new and rapid establishment of graduate level programs that have implications for national economic development. As described in this study, beginning in the early 1980s, the Chinese government launched the first of a number of reforms meant to encourage the development of graduate programs and to change the face of China's higher education system. These programs were a substantial success. The quick development of the Ph.D. programs and the increasing number of students are part of a larger effort by the national government to increase China's national economic competitiveness and to both retain talent and attract Chinese nationals with graduate degrees to return to a robust economy with growing universities and research centers. At the same time, Chinese graduate education is still developing, and it faces many challenges. There is a need to both increase enrollment and to significantly improve the quality of its faculty and academic programs, with a focus on increasing the ability of students to pursue both scientific research and their knowledge of other nations and cultures. (Contains 4 tables and 13 footnotes.)

The United States has long enjoyed being on the cutting edge in its devotion to building a vibrant higher education sector. After a century of leading the world in participation rates in higher education, however, there are strong indications that America's advantage is waning. The academic research enterprise remains relatively vibrant. However, participation and degree attainment rates have leveled off and are showing signs of actual decline in a number of major states with large populations--and this seems to be more than just a bump or short-term market correction. Other competitive nations, and in particular key members of the European Union, along with China, India and other developing economies, are aggressively nurturing their higher education systems, expanding access, and better positioning themselves in the global economy. They have been trying harder, while in the US public funding for higher education has declined. The nation's international and domestic concerns lie elsewhere. In addition to outlining these reasons that America's higher education advantage is waning, this article also discusses the possible consequences. (Contains 53 notes.)

China's first national science curriculum was adopted in the 1950s from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). With the rapid changes in science and technology over the past 50 years, an educational change became an unavoidable requirement. This document reviews reform movements in the following areas: (1) main problems in Chinese science curriculum; (2) objectives of the reform movement; (3) reform of curriculum structure; (4) science learning, teaching, and assessment; and (5) curriculum management. (YDS)

Spectacular contemporary growth in private higher education challenges the "new institutionalism" and its emphasis on "isomorphism." The growth brings great inter-organizational distinctiveness and is linked to technically rational competition. Findings about this growth and distinctiveness lead us to re-assess and revise tenets of the new institutionalism. Some tenets remain in tack in logic even as they miss on the empirical side, failing to anticipate salient tendencies such as the retreat of the state. The new institutionalism requires much less revision to help us understand the degree of isomorphism that does accompany private higher education growth. The findings come largely from analysis of three countries (Argentina, China, and Hungary), inter-sectoral differences, and organizational goals. They extend our view of variables such as subsectors, environment, and time. They cover both the coercive and non-coercive sides of the new institutionalism's isomorphism. And they encompass international as well as domestic tendencies. Private higher education growth is linked to widespread changes in political-economy. These changes often reduce the centrality of the state and its public institutions while opening up possibilities for alternative organizational goals and means to legitimacy. The findings on private higher education thus allow for speculation on how the new institutionalism can be modified and interpreted in many fields undergoing robust and multi-faceted privatization. (Contains 55 notes.)

Recent world developments have created an opportune time for nations to vigorously pursue a policy of converting the huge portion of their economies that traditionally have been devoted to military expenditures to more socially productive uses. This paper outlines a strategy for such a conversion, and discusses the issues that must be confronted in such a process. Specific aspects of conversion include: (1) misconceptions about lessening military spending; (2) building a conversion coalition; (3) the paths forged by China and the Soviet Union; (4) upheaval in Eastern Europe; and (5) grassroots initiatives in the West. It is concluded that the gathering pressure for disarmament suggests that conversion will be a topic gaining importance during the 1990's. A number of statistical tables, charts, and maps appear throughout this paper, and 127 endnotes are provided. (DB)

With the aim of tailoring future programming decisions to local conditions and concerns, an ethnographic study was commissioned to examine childrearing practices in a small middle income village in Hebei Province, China. The research was designed to learn about the concerns and goals of child care providers, and about the strategic thinking and activities that derived from these goals and concerns. This report details the study of 10 children between the ages 1 and 3 and their caregivers, typically parents or grandparents, who were observed over a 12-month period as they went about their everyday routines. Additional information was obtained through conversations with caregivers. The research was conducted in three stages, each stage during a different agricultural season. Section 1 of the report summarizes the child care arrangements for each of the children studied, showing that arrangements varied by family, and frequently changed throughout the year to accommodate parental employment and other circumstances. Section 2 of the report describes adults' practices and expectations with respect to children's health and hygiene, the various activities comprising a child's day, what adults endeavor to teach children, and children's relationships with adults. The topics covered in this section of the report address the key areas of concern articulated by childcare providers in the course of the research: (1) child health, hygiene, and the body; (2) children's activities, including toys, books, television, drawing and writing, visiting friends, and visiting relatives; (3) purposeful teaching, including names, personal information, songs and poems, counting, and teaching styles; and (4) behavior toward adults, including obedience, addressing adults, and hosting adult guests. (KB)

In this paper, we examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students' long-term development. We explore the implementation of the "largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date," which connected China's best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. We find evidence that exposure to the program improved students' academic achievement, labor performance, and computer usage. We observe these effects up to ten years after program implementation. These findings indicate that education technology can have long-lasting positive effects on a variety of outcomes and can be effective in reducing the rural--urban education gap. [Funding for this research was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.]

EdTech which includes online education, computer assisted learning (CAL), and remote instruction was expanding rapidly even before the current full-scale substitution for in-person learning at all levels of education around the world because of the coronavirus pandemic. Studies of CAL interventions have consistently found large positive effects, bolstering arguments for the widespread use of EdTech. However CAL programs, often held after school, provide not only computer-based instruction, but often additional non-technology based inputs such as more time on learning and instructional support by facilitators. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to carefully explore the possible channels by which CAL programs might affect academic outcomes among schoolchildren. We isolate and test the technology-based effects of CAL and additional parameters from the theoretical model, by designing a novel multi-treatment field experiment with more than four thousand schoolchildren in rural China. Although we find evidence of positive overall CAL program effects on academic outcomes, when we isolate the technology-based effect of CAL (over and above traditional pencil-and-paper learning) we generally find small to null effects. Our empirical results suggest that, at times, the "Tech" in EdTech may have relatively small effects on academic outcomes, which has important implications for the continued, rapid expansion of technologies such as CAL throughout the world. [Funding for this research was provided by Dell Global Giving and the TELOS Initiative at the GSE at Stanford.]

This paper offers a broad look at accreditation and quality assurance in higher education and how these issues are addressed around the world. Section 1 is an overview of accreditation and addresses the aims and objectives of accreditation, standards, accreditation bodies, stages of the accreditation process, the quality of that process, the role of government in the accreditation process, some critical points of view concerning the process, and present accreditation trends. Section 2 looks at accreditation and quality assurance through brief national case studies. The nations represented are France, Germany, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, China, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Australia. This section closes with a section comparing accreditation and quality assurance in various regions. Section 3 takes a closer and more detailed look at the accreditation process in Romania, particularly in light of the recent political and educational changes in this nation and the fairly recent decision to introduce accreditation of institutions of higher education. This examination covers accreditation principles and objectives, standards for initial and subsequent accreditation, application rules, structure of the accreditation committee and its functions, and provisions for financing accreditation. Appendixes contain institutional evaluation standards and a glossary. (Contains 27 references.) (JB)

A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam--the national college entrance exam, and the government sets admission cutoff scores for elite colleges. We examine the impacts of scoring above the elite-tier cutoff on a student's access to elite colleges and wage outcomes after graduation, using the discontinuity around the cutoff score. By employing hand-collected survey data, we find that scoring above the cutoff not only increases the chance of entering an elite college but also raises a young person's first-job wages after graduation. We also find that those just above the cutoff have peers with higher scores and better social networks than those below the cutoff, but it is less clear whether the two groups use their time differently in college.

Despite strong demand for attending high schools with better peers, there is mixed evidence on whether doing so improves academic outcomes. We estimate the cognitive returns to high school quality using administrative data on a high-stakes college entrance exam in China. To overcome selection bias, we use a regression discontinuity design that compares applicants barely above and below high school admission thresholds. Results indicate that while peer quality improves significantly across all sets of admission cutoffs, the only increase in performance occurs from attending Tier I high schools. Further evidence suggests that the returns to high school quality are driven by teacher quality, rather than peer quality or class size. [The research conducted in this paper is covered under Texas A&M University IRB #2015-0208.]

Obesity is an important global health problem. Although obesity is not directly related to access to health care or constrained by resource deprivation, overweight status is predominantly found in poor, less-educated populations. This paper seeks to identify the causal role of schooling in affecting obesity among children and adolescents, using new estimation methods that exploit unique panel data on young twins in China. The estimates indicate that higher levels of schooling negatively affect being overweight and positively affect healthy behavior, with a large component of the causal effects due to increased information on the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight. There is also evidence that the higher-income associated with increased schooling increases incentives to invest in health.

This paper estimates the return to an elite university education over a college graduate's career using the CHIP 2013 data. We find a substantial premium for graduating from an elite Chinese university at job entry, but it declines quickly with labor market experience. This pattern is entirely driven by the young cohorts who enter college after the higher education expansion that started in 1999. This pattern is more pronounced in coastal provinces and in economically more developed regions, where individual skills are highly rewarded in the labor market. The initial elite premium and its subsequent decline is found just for males; individual skills are much more consistently rewarded for females than males. The results are consistent with employer learning, where employers pay workers based on more easily observable group characteristics at job entry but rely less on these over time when more accurate information about individual productivity becomes available.

This paper compares the influence of state policies on gender roles and women's empowerment in China, India, and South Korea. In 1950, these newly formed states were largely poor and agrarian, with common cultural factors that placed similar severe constraints on women's autonomy. The three countries followed very different paths of development, which have had a tremendous impact on gender outcomes. Today the countries show striking differences in the extent of gender equity achieved, with China showing the most gender equity and South Korea the least. India has achieved considerable improvement in gender equity, but both men and women continue to struggle with poverty, illiteracy, and poor health conditions. Following an overview of kinship systems and the construction of gender in the three countries, this paper focuses on several key issues: access to education, employment and income patterns, women's health and health education, family law and the legal rights of women, and state efforts to influence gender-related values and behaviors through mass communication. The experiences of these three countries suggest that even when states are interested in promoting gender equity, their actions are often constrained by the desire to maintain stable family structures. In addition, it is very difficult for states to alter inequitable rural rules of residence and land ownership, which form part of the moral order of rural society. Transition to an urban economy often loosens the constraints to gender equity. The impact of policies to provide opportunities for women's empowerment have been greatly enhanced by communication efforts to alter cultural values that impede women's access to those opportunities. (Contains 59 references.) (SV)

In the last three decennia, many governments have introduced market mechanisms in education. They have done so by enhancing parental choice and encouraging school competition, through policies like abolishing catchment areas, creating voucher programmes and setting up charter schools. These market mechanisms have given rise to fierce debates in both political and scientific circles. However, most prior reviews of research literature in this area have concluded that the effects of market mechanisms in education are small, if they are found at all. This review tries to answer the question why that is the case, by analysing the causal pathways that link market mechanisms to educational outcomes and by reviewing the empirical evidence for each step along those causal pathways. The findings of this review point to the need for a nuanced and qualified discussion about market mechanisms in education. What market mechanisms mean in actual practice strongly depends on (local) contexts, while the impact of market mechanisms is related to other policies impacting on parental choice behaviour as well as actions taken by schools. Appended are: (1) Country Case Studies; and (2) Terminology. Notes are also included. (Contains 1 table.)

China and India have faced similar conditions and challenges in education during their rapid industrial and social transformation. The two countries started building their national education systems under comparable conditions in the late 1940s. However, different policies, strategies, and historical circumstances have led them through different routes. China has outperformed India in primary and secondary education along a broad spectrum of access, quality, and delivery indicators. India, on the other hand, enjoys a competitive edge over China in higher education. Recently, India has begun catching up with China in K-12 education, while China has already overtaken India in terms of the college enrollment and number of graduates. The respective successes and challenges of the Chinese and Indian education systems offer valuable lessons for both countries and for the rest of the developing world. The authors identify issues that deserve further attention of researchers and policymakers. (Contains 6 figures, 2 tables, 14 footnotes, and a bibliography.)

A community development program in rural China aimed to enhance women's economic and social opportunities as a means of lowering fertility rates. The program involved agricultural seminars and extension services, organized cultural and entertainment activities, and political meetings. Village leaders took part in seminars on community development, women's participation, and their impact on women's fertility attitudes. Women were given priority access to agricultural extension services supported by local government, including information, training, and technical assistance related to farming techniques and various economically productive activities. Funds for setting up village libraries, reading rooms, and social and entertainment facilities came from village taxes or general funds. The program was implemented in 1993 across 17 of China's 28 provinces. This paper examines the program's social and economic impact, drawing on a detailed 1996 household survey conducted in 38 participating and 19 nonparticipating villages. The program substantially increased women's economic and social participation and household income. However, income gains accrued only to participants, and partly at the expense of nonparticipants. The program also produced broader social benefits, having significant positive influences on gender and fertility attitudes and on expenditures for children's education. The findings support the view that effectively implemented gender-focused interventions can have substantial social benefits when supported by the necessary legal and institutional framework. (Contains 54 references.) (SV)

The primary, secondary, and higher education textbooks used in China today date from the late 1970s which makes them inadequate for the current stress on science and technology in education. While 70 percent of the higher education textbooks are mimeographed, unedited manuscripts, the majority of published books are printed on newsprint quality paper with small pages, narrow margins, and poor illustrations and line drawings, and the pages are too crowded with print. This evaluation report discusses and offers recommendations for: (1) the financial management of textbook production and sales; (2) the implementation of upgrading the textbooks; (3) the educational effectiveness of textbooks; (4) textbook distribution; and (5) the projected work force needed for the publication process. Appendix 1 contains charts and tables of educational government agencies, publishing houses, and publishers involved with the production, while appendices 2 and 3 contain data tables of education statistics and the estimated cost for publication. Appendix 4 is a glossary of printing terms, and appendix 5 contains an eight-item annotated bibliography. Tables are included. (DJC)

The conference recorded in this document covered a wide variety of themes and consisted of keynote addresses, research presentations, and workshops. The following keynote addresses are included: "Technician Training: A New Zealand Perspective" (Wood); and "The Provision of Information Services in Vocational Education: The Present and the Future" (Lee). The following research presentations are included: "Responding to Diversity: Learning Styles in Vocational Education" (Andrews); "The Future for Vocational and Technical Education" (Strong); "Alternative Approaches to Vocational Education--The Malaysian Experience" (Saleh); "Recent Initiatives in Staff Development in Vocational Education in Scotland" (Niven); and "Vocational Education: An International Perspective" (Hickey). The following workshop presentations are included: "Teaching Learning Skills as a Foundation for Technical Training" (Nelson); "Approaches to Instructional Strategies for an Information-Based Society" (Ross); "Socialization and Cognitive Process in the Appropriation of Technical-Scientific Knowledge and Practical Abilities in Vocational High School" (Hardy); "An Experimental Study of Incorporating Creative and Inventive Concepts into Vocational High School Curricula" (Wu); "Teaching and Learning in TAFE: Does TAFE Sell Its Students Short?" (Gove); "Vocational Qualification and Access to Higher Education" (Smithers); "Competency Tests: Their Role in Selection of Apprentice and Trainee Technical Officers in Australia" (Holdgate); "Development and Analysis of a Criterion-Referenced Test Item Bank" (Hinton); "Follow-up Studies of Vocational and Technical Education Graduates Using State Databases" (Strong); "Analysis of a Programme of Electromechanics of Automated Systems in Terms of Underlying Physical Concepts and Principles" (Gagnon); "Fast Track Apprenticeships and Multi-Skilling: Can We Have the Best of Both Worlds?" (Thomas); "Collecting Case Studies in TAFE Curriculum: Some Problems" (McBeath); "Teacher Motivation in Vocational Education: Causes and Consequences" (Nyberg); "Vocational Teacher Education: Research into Practice" (Prichard); "Evaluation of the In-Service Education Ordinance and Programs for Industrial Vocational Teachers in the Republic of China" (Shieh); "Apprentices Literacy Skills" (Sofo); "Regional Colleges: Resource Sharing between Vocational Education and Higher Education" (Atkinson); "Student Withdrawal from Part-Time Courses of Further Education" (Parkin); and "Improving the Quality of Vocational Education" (Jain). (CML)

In attempts to forestall problems inherent in too-rapid urbanization, China has instituted a migration policy designed to strictly control changes in permanent residence from rural areas or small urban places to larger cities and to encourage the development of small cities and towns. The policy is enforced through the household registration system, whereby each person has an official place of residence and must obtain official permission to change locations. Within these controls, considerable migration does occur, much of it for job-related reasons or for education. Such temporary migration, which has increased greatly, is sanctioned because it is seen as providing benefits without concurrently imposing burdens on the cities. Temporary movement (1) absorbs a considerable portion of the surplus rural areas; (2) generates income to fuel a rising standard of living in rural areas; (3) meets demands for service workers and other needs associated with improving the quality of life in cities; and most importantly, (4) provides linkages between rural and urban places. Coupled with a realization on restrictions governing permanent migration from villages to towns, temporary movement may serve as a first step in the development of small, rural oriented urban centers that are intended to provide employment opportunities and some urban amenities not otherwise available in rural areas. It remains to be seen whether such towns or the temporary contacts that peasants have with the cities will satisfy the rising consumer demands and aspirations for a better quality of life, or whether the listed exposure to urban life styles will instead increase peasants' desire to live in cities. (LH)