The gap between China’s elite universities and the rest of its higher education sector is widening, according to the results of Times Higher Education’s latest ranking, suggesting the country’s excellence initiative is already starting to have an effect.
China’s Peking University and Tsinghua University claim the top two ranks of the THE Emerging Economies University Rankings 2018 for the fifth year in a row. The country takes a further five places in the Top 10 (one more than last year) and one in six — or 63 — positions in the table overall, up from 52 last year. All of China’s 14 universities in the Top 50 have either remained stable or risen. Harbin Institute of Technology, for instance, has climbed 12 places to #29. However, a different picture emerges lower down the table; 20 Chinese institutions, all of which are ranked below the Top 50, have dropped places. The results could be a consequence of the country’s Double World-Class Project, which has run since 2015 and focuses funding support on select universities and disciplines.
Writing for THE’s Emerging Economies University Rankings supplement, Ka Ho Mok, vice president and Lam Man Tsan chair professor of comparative policy at Lingnan University Hong Kong, says that in mainland China, “preferential treatment of certain tiers of universities will inevitably intensify educational inequality”. “If the Chinese government cannot properly address the widening gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, particularly the regional variations clearly revealed by the Double World-Class Project, with top university clusters located in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing areas, then the stratification process will unquestionably produce different social classes of students,” he writes.
He adds that students in China have also “begun to complain about a perceived decline in the quality of teaching”, given that institutions now “place far more importance on research and knowledge-transfer related activities”.