Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China focuses on Chinese private higher education institutions and investigates their institutional management efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market. The dissertation firstly describes and analyzes how these mostly demand-absorbing institutions include elements aimed at meeting labor market demands in their mission statements, and how they improve student employability and bridge graduates and employers through job-oriented fields of study provision, educational delivery, career services, as well as networking and partnerships. It then examines graduate surveys on initial employment outcomes about employment status, starting salary, job and education match, and job satisfaction, while exploring the associations of these outcomes with managed institutional efforts. Finally, it builds a conceptual model with two dimensions that illustrates institutional variations in management efforts and initial graduate employment outcomes. This dissertation concludes that many of the demand-absorbing Chinese private higher education institutions have managed serious efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market and some of them are even semi-elite in their job-oriented institutional efforts and initial employment outcomes.

This publication is the first from the Leverhulme program of study, which focused on the major strategic options likely to be available to higher education institutions and policy-making bodies in the 1980s and 1990s. It resulted from a specialist seminar on higher education and the labor market. The chapters are: "Employers' Perceptions of Demand" (Laurence C. Hunter); "Technological Manpower" (Derek L. Bosworth); "Response to Change in the United States" (Richard B. Freeman); "Higher Education Policy" (Maurice Peston); and "The Challenge of Market Imperatives" (Robert M. Lindley). Lindley notes that the British higher education system has never come to grips with the role it might play in economic development and examines some areas of need and improvement: the search for more students; the need to get the labor market more involved in the environment of higher education and to get education to respond to market need with qualified persons; the role of higher education in the screening and credentialism process; to encourage industry's role in funding and organizing higher education; and stabilizing the labor market environment. It is concluded that labor market issues have to be handled at a more sophisticated level than the debate about manpower alone. (LC)

This book provides an overview of the growth of the private higher education sector in China and in addition provides an analysis of some of the key drivers of this growth and impediments to it. What is new about the book is that it combines the results of a series of interviews with work that is more quantitative in nature. The book is of use to not only those engaged in academic research but also those who more generally wish to know more about an educational sector that is growing in importance. The most obvious factors promoting expansion of this sector have been the growth in per capita incomes, higher levels of participation in secondary school education, the strong growth in demand for graduates and the inability of the public sector to keep pace with demand. All of these factors intermingled with the involvement of government regulation. This regulation, however, is not uniform across all of China given the different provincial government departments of education that are also involved in dealing with private higher education institutions. In particular, this book looks at the way in which the Chinese government’s regulatory framework (both national and provincial) influenced the development of the sector and the way in which it operates, especially the private higher education component of that sector. The analysis undertaken finds that there is a link between regulation and the private higher education sector growth and a link between the funding of the government sector. The more intense regulation was, and the more funds provided to the state sector, the less scope there was for the private sector to expand. Growth of the private sector, therefore, did not just depend upon rising demand for higher education overall, but also to a fair degree of tolerance on the part of government. Much of this work, in subsequent years, has been supported by the further changes that have been undertaken in the Chinese higher education sector. Over the years, the growth of the Chinese higher education sector has stabilised, as has the private segment of this sector.

This book empirically investigates the changes in labor market structure accompanying the labor market reform in China by focusing on the labor market segmentation problems from the 1980s to 2013. The book also aims to examine the effect of labor policy reforms on individual, household and enterprise behavior, including the causes and consequences of labor market reform in China, particularly the influences of labor policy reforms on labor market performance. Offering valuable insights into the changing structure of the Chinese economy, this book will be of interest to scholars, activists, and economists.

A major transformation of Chinese higher education (HE) has taken place over the past decade – China has reshaped its higher education sector from elite to mass education with the number of graduates having quadrupled to three million a year over six years. China is exceptional among lower income countries in using tertiary education as a development strategy on such a scale, aiming to improve the quality of its graduates, and make HE available to as many of its citizens as possible. This book provides a critical examination the challenges to the development and sustainability of higher education in China: Can its universities move from quantity to quality? How will so many graduates find jobs in line with their expectations? Can Britain and other western countries continue to benefit from China’s education boom? What are the prospects for collaboration in research? This book evaluates the prospects for Chinese and foreign HE providers, regulators and other stakeholders. It introduces the key changes in China’s HE programme since the Opening-Up policy in 1978 and analyses the achievements and the challenges over the subsequent three decades. Furthermore, it sheds light on new reforms that are likely to take place in the future, particularly as a result of the ongoing international financial crisis.

This book concentrates exploring the landscape of private education in contemporary China, including pre-schools, compulsory education, high schools, and higher education. Both the developmental opportunities, problems, and strategies in regard to shaping the promotion of China’s private education are examined in this book. The intended readers are scholars and researchers who are interested and work in research of the private education in Chinese context.

This book makes both empirical and conceptual contributions to the debate on privatization of higher education in China. Empirically, it aims to fill a gap in our knowledge of privatization of higher education in North China. To this end, Beijing was chosen as a case for analysis, and nine local higher educational institutions were visited. The case study strategy is also complemented by an extensive review of national policies to reveal problems beyond the specific case of Beijing and of national concern. The effects of the cultural and socioeconomic background and the unique state-party controlling system on higher education management are stressed. Conceptually, most existing studies on privatization of higher education in China adopt a policy analysis approach, while research on privatization of other public sectors or in other countries is frequently guided by economic theories. This book thus seeks to combine both social policy and econometric approaches to provide a systematic and detailed investigation of the privatization process in the context of higher education. It also improves examines the applicability of western theories in the Chinese context.