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Against the backdrop of high-quality development of the national economy, the development of each city is also facing transformation and upgrading. Cities need high-quality development, and high-quality talents are the key. The problem of attracting high-quality talents in domestic small and medium-sized cities in high-quality development needs to be solved urgently. This paper takes Huai'an, a third-tier city in China, as an example, to understand the intentions and confusions of college students when they seek employment. The qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews is employed. The study finds that in small and medium-sized cities, factors hindering college students from staying in local cities for employment include that the intensity of the government in publicizing high-quality development has not reached to most college students, the guide courses in colleges and universities meet difficulties in the process of delivery, and college students' own career planning are not guided well. In response to the above problems, this paper puts forward suggestions such as strengthening the positive interaction between schools and college students, enhancing the publicity of high-quality urban development among college students, and closely integrating college students' career guidance courses with local development. Quality development attracts more high-quality talents.

Purpose: This article presents a definition and rationale for evidence-based reform in education, and a discussion of the current state of evidence-based research, focusing on China, the U.S., and the UK. Design/Approach/Methods: The article contrasts the state of educational research in the U.S., the UK, and China, world leaders in evidence-based reform. Findings: The article suggests ways in which Chinese, U.S., UK, and other scholars might improve the worldwide quality of evidence-based reform in education. One indicator of this partnership is an agreement among the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nanjing Normal University, and Johns Hopkins University to work together on Chinese and English versions of the website Best Evidence in Brief and a collaboration between Johns Hopkins and the "ECNU Review of Education" at East China Normal University. Originality/Value: This article is the first to compare developments in evidence-based reform in education in China with parallel developments in the U.S. and UK Building understanding of current evidence-based policies should help all countries learn how evidence can play a greater role in education policy and benefit many students.

This article examines the intents and effects of China's national policies to promote a synergistic approach to university-industry collaborative education. These policies set out to reduce the academia-industry disconnection for engineering education. Based on document analysis and interviews with various types of stakeholders, the study reveals that China has strived for a synergistic approach to education by strengthening the main-actor role of enterprises, framing a policy support system, incorporating external stakeholders in universities' governance structures, and building a coordinated framework for a synergistic approach to education. These policies have enhanced enterprises' motivation to participate in university education, deepened enterprises' engagement with engineering education at course level, and created an educational innovation ecosystem. Some challenges remain such as the mismatch between course update and technological development, the mismatch between costs and return for faculty members, and difficulty in assessment of outcomes. Overwhelmingly, China has tried exploring a model conducive to the improvement of higher education quality, and the overlapping triple helix model, compared with the statist or laissez-faire patterns, has a more robust effect in galvanizing stakeholders towards their collective goal in the Chinese context.

This study examines how Chinese postgraduate students' personal worldviews are separately and collectively shaped by the interplay of neoliberalism, Confucianism and patriotism. The findings reveal that neoliberalism contributes to Chinese postgraduates' enterprising self by shaping their subjectivity in pursuing personal goals, influencing their thinking with the market logics of efficiency, effectiveness and ­quantifiable outcomes, and leaving them with a predisposition toward deregulation. Confucianism prompts the postgraduates to self-strengthen at the individual level and guides them with interaction norms at the interpersonal level. Patriotism underpins the postgraduates' psychological and emotional power based on strengthened memories of historical events and pride in national achievements, thereby generating a deep-seated collective identity. Counteracting and consolidating forces are identified based on the interplay of the three "isms," resulting in the Chinese postgraduates' partial individualization. The partial individualization reflected in today's Chinese postgraduates features a consistent rather than divisible dual-self.

Against the backdrop of teaching being downplayed in higher education, this study unravels how the university faculty members' implementation of teaching excellence is influenced by the interplay of objective structural conditionings and subjective internal deliberations, drawing upon Margaret Archer's social realist framework and her distinction between human reflexive modalities. By exploring 21 faculty members from three Chinese universities with different structural constraints and enablements, the study shows that dual modalities are manifest in all faculty members, among which meta-reflexivity applies to everyone. However, autonomous reflexivity and communicative reflexivity play more dominant roles in generating purposeful actions under the same structure. Furthermore, some structural forces are non-negotiable constraints, and people having the same reflexivity modality may act differently under different structural conditionings. The study calls for universities to cater to both structural arrangements and reflexive deliberations to transform constraints into enablements for teaching excellence.

This article reports on a study that analysed multiple logics behind the development of doctoral education in China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand. The analysis focused on the development over the past two decades and general measures to ensure quality. Research materials analysed in this article consisted of semi-structured interviews with insiders in the doctoral education system in each of the five countries. The findings reveal that the growth of the doctoral education sector in China follows "state logic," "profession logic" and "corporation logic." Doctoral education in Japan shows "state logic," "profession logic" and "market logic." "State logic," "market logic" and "corporation logic" are manifested in South Korea's doctoral education sector, whereas "state logic" and "profession logic" are prominent in Singapore. Doctoral education in Thailand mostly follows "state logic" and "market logic." Establishing and completing the external and internal quality mechanisms, tightening quality inspection procedures and raising requirements for students are common measures put in place for quality assurance throughout East and Southeast Asia.

This article reports on a study in which the legitimisation of shared governance in the Chinese higher education sector was investigated. Norman Fairclough's three-level discourse analysis was used for analysing documents and interviews. The research materials consist of thirteen Chinese university statutes and qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 university administrators, faculty members, students and social representatives. The research focused on how university statute texts articulate shared governance, and how shared governance is practically implemented. Study findings demonstrate that Chinese university statute discourses officially legitimise shared governance in various manifestations, by replacing the term "management" with the term "governance" in statute texts, explicitly using democracy-related phrases, especially establishing a "joint meeting mechanism" at both institutional and departmental levels, and by using the wording "multiple-stakeholder participation" in university affairs. In practice, shared governance is a recognised ideal of governance structures to embrace among all different stakeholders. Chinese universities have, more than ever before, taken up shared governance practices. Yet, the degree of participation, or "sharing," in policy implementation in general, remains to be further improved compared with the ideal state stipulated in discourses. Findings identify tokenism as a feature of policy implementation. Insufficient administrative professionalism is identified as a catalyst for such tokenism--a reason for why shared governance efforts remain incomplete thus far.

This paper examines the "imaginaries" taking place in New Engineering Education (NEE). The NEE is the most recent reform of the engineering education sector in China and is used to interrogate the more encompassing backdrop of the country's national imaginary, the "Chinese Dream." Further, this paper analyzes three important policy documents that constitute the blueprint of the NEE. Drawing on Charles Taylor's concept of the "social imaginary" and using critical discourse analysis, a close analysis of the discursive construction of the technological and national elements in the policy texts is carried out. This combinatory theoretical and analytical framework is used to examine how a normative vision and ideology of the development of engineering education is constructed as taking a "new" direction. In undertaking this policy analysis, this paper demonstrates how a rising power is revolutionizing its engineering education as a resource, coupled with the ideological "social (national) imagination" of the Chinese Dream, to extend its power and geopolitical positioning in a competitive and globalized economy.

Against the backdrop of prevalent student attrition in engineering education, this study draws upon Margaret Archer's social realistic theory and offers a close-up analysis of how structural and cultural factors interplay to affect Chinese university engineering faculty members' perceptions of and agency in practicing 'scholarly teaching'. Incorporating Chinese socio-cultural contexts and the distinctive requirements of engineering education, this study investigates how structural and cultural facilitating factors are overwhelmed by more powerful inhibiting factors in shaping Chinese engineering faculty members' implementation of scholarly teaching. This article argues that such predominance of inhibiting factors results from the stronger role of communicative reflexivity in influencing faculty members' agency than autonomous reflexivity and meta-reflexivity.

Several major reform areas attempted by 'New Engineering Education' (NEE), China's most recent engineering education reform initiative at university level, are examined for their direct and indirect impact on Chinese STEM-major students' satisfaction with their programs in this study. With data collected from a sample of 619 Chinese undergraduate students, the measurement and structural models both display good model fits. The structural results indicate that "course satisfaction" fully mediates the impact of "classroom instruction method" on "program satisfaction," while partially mediates the impact of "support from faculty members" and "alternative assessment methods" on "program satisfaction." The impact of "resource and service" on "program satisfaction," however, is direct without any mediating effect in between. Multigroup analyses show that the impact of "alternative assessment methods" on "course satisfaction" is significantly stronger for first-tier university students than for non-first-tier university students. Furthermore, there is stronger impact of "resource and service" on "program satisfaction" for junior and senior students than for freshmen and sophomores. Practical implications are discussed.

This paper investigates the power landscapes within Chinese universities, against the larger backdrop of China's attempt to build modern university governance systems for developing world-class universities. Drawing upon Fairclough's three-dimensional conceptions of discourse and informed by Pierre Bourdieu's key conceptual notions of field and capital, the paper provides a critical discourse analysis of statutes of 10 top Chinese universities in terms of their texts, discursive practices and social practices and thus analyses existing power relations. The statute texts construct a hierarchical field of power by wording the 'core' stakeholder Party Committee as the leadership, using content sequence as a measure of power ranking, and including only limited stakeholders in the joint governance mechanism. Regarding discursive practices, faculty members' participation in the formulation and distribution of university statutes is insufficient. The social practices identify with statute texts in terms of power relationships between Party Committee members, administrators and academics.

Since becoming a formal signatory of the Washington Accord in 2016, China has outlined an initiative 'New Engineering Education' (NEE) to reform its engineering education at university level. This paper elaborates upon the NEE initiative by presenting analysis of its domestic and international context, the goals of the initiative, how the initiative draws upon international standards, major actions under the initiative, and the challenges remaining for NEE to achieve its goals. The paper argues that China views international practices and standards of engineering education in developed nations as highlands to imitate and surpass, and the NEE goals embody an ambitious systematic rather than partial reform of the sector. China has pushed forward the NEE reform with measures such as formulating National Standards for dozens of categories of engineering programs, commissioning 600+ research projects on NEE development, establishing new engineering programs and interdisciplinary courses, strengthening university-partnership, updating accreditation for engineering programs, and improving both external and internal quality assurance mechanism. The sector, however, still faces challenges in achieving systematic quality upgrade due to hindering factors like enlarged uneven resource allocation, downplayed teaching activities and the difficulties in reforming the curricula system. Expected changes are also discussed.

Based on the self-reflection of 22 undergraduate students at a renowned Chinese university regarding their journey towards obtaining a bachelor's degree, this study reveals the discrepancy between the idealistic functions and missions of higher education as perceived by students and their actual implementations in the real world. It further explores the multifaceted logics exerted by the higher education environment on students during their educational journey. Data analysis shows that contemporary global neoliberalism, alongside traditional Chinese cultural ideologies such as Confucianism and Daoism, significantly impacts the educational philosophies of university students to varying extents. These diverse ideologies drive students to demonstrate varied learning states and behaviors, showcasing the complex interplay of global and local forces in shaping student experiences in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]