Missouri has deep - and wide - collaborations with Chinese partners. For example, work in China by our School of Journalism goes back 100 years. The Colleges of Engineering, Agriculture, Education, and Arts and Science and other academic divisions all engage in active China research projects. Our campus is also sending more students to study in China, and we're seeing rapid steady growth in applications and enrollment of Chinese students.
As Director of the International Center, I stand in the middle of all this productive, multi-directional traffic. I keep thinking that the connections I witness are very important to the past, present and future of our university. If that's true, I need to learn a lot more.
In case you're interested, here are two more sources I've found for my edification.
- For general purposes, there's a great and current China profile published by the BBC. This provides a really useful current background at your fingertips. (Of course, this goes for other countries of interest, as well).
- For a recent and thorough overview of higher education issues in China, see this recently published report from the OECD.
The report also reaches the following additional conclusions:
- A major task is to clarify the mission of all types of tertiary education institutions to meet varying needs, while ensuring consistency in the performance standards of institutions to improve equity and efficiency.
- Opportunities for access and success are unequally distributed. This reflects differences in economic circumstances of regions, and the capacity and quality of their primary and secondary school systems.
- China must take particular care to balance the need to build research-intensive globally competitive universities and the need to build the capacity of other institutions to contribute to national and regional needs.
- Educational authorities and institutions should engage more directly with employers, to identify changing job requirements and monitor employers’ expectations of graduates and satisfaction with their performance.
- There must be a higher level of investment in the national quality assurance system and a more nationally consistent approach to quality control.
- Further enlargement of China’s national innovation system will require continuing efforts to build basic research capacity in selected universities, increase the pool of science and technology researchers and promote stronger processes of knowledge exchange.
- The internationalisation of tertiary education and research in China is changing the nature of educational demand as well as supply, leading to new pressures on national policy frameworks, including qualifications recognition, tuition pricing, quality assurance and consumer protection.
