Chinese Education Finance: Issues and Challenges

Chinese Higher Education Finance: Issues and Challenges WANG Rong, WEI Jianguo,YANG Po,Yi Qian Peking University, P.R. China Part III. Financial Aid for College Students in China Equal distribution of higher education opportunity does not come along naturally with the rapid higher education expansion in China. This is particularly true for the distribution of high quality higher education resources. The socioeconomic stratification among students from different HEIs becomes increasingly explicit, implying that students from low SES background increasingly tend to concentrate in low quality institutions. At the meantime, the priorities of governmental financial support focus predominantly on elite central colleges and universities. Thus it leaves relatively little support for locally owned higher education institutions who serve the majority of low SES students. Hence, it is critical to set up a student aid system to accommodate the needs of those disadvantaged students. In the past several years, Chinese government initiated several higher education financial aid schemes with some successes and failures. The following discussion is based on the current higher education financial aid scheme in China, reflecting on their achievements, issues and challenges. 1. Historical Development of Chinese Higher Education Financial Aid System Parallel to the rapid expansion of Chinese higher education system and the introduction of cost-sharing policy in higher education sector, Chinese student financial aid system grows up gradually in the past several years. Since 1997, all higher education institutions in China adopted a single-track admission system which