china’s engineering education: situation

Chinese Academy of Engineering

China’s Engineering Education: Situation & Outlook

Zhu GaofengMember, Former Executive Vice President of CAE

06/03/2014

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Chinese Academy of EngineeringChinese Academy of Engineering

The level of engineering technologies reflects a country’s core competence.

“Building up indigenous innovation capabilities and becoming an innovative country” has been regarded as the “core of our national development strategies”, which will be the key to improvement of China’s overall national strength.

In recent years, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, actively involved in the reform of China’s engineering education, has conducted a lot of survey and research.

I’d like to exchange our thoughts hereby with foreign colleagues in the fields of engineering education.

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Outline

I. Achievements.

II. Problems and weakness points.

III. Outlooks.

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I. Achievements

1. Rapid expanding of scale

China, amid the industrialization age, has an enormous demand for engineering talents.

The enrollment of students expend very fast in the decade from2000 to 2011.see table 1 for details.

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Table 1: Number of students pursuing associate and bachelor’s degrees and new enrollment in 2000 and 2011

Number of students pursuing associate

and bachelor’s degreesNumber of students newly enrolled

Number of

students

attending

engineering

programs

Percentage

Number of

students

attending

engineering

programs

Percentage

20005.561

million

2.148

million38.6%

2.206

million832,000 37.7%

201122.318

million

8.689

million38.9%

6.618

million

2.635

million39.8%

Average annual

growth13.5% 13.6% - 10.5% 11% -

Average annual

growth in the

first five years

23% 20% - 18% 17% -

[1] The statistical calibers of the figures in this row changed a little after 2012.

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The engineering program participants account one third to 40% of the total. China ranks No. 1 among all countries in terms of both absolute number and proportion of students attending engineering programs.

The gross enrollment rate for higher education was 30 percent in 2012. but expansion rate is decreasing in recent years.

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I. Achievements

2. Positive change in educational structure After1949 new China was founded, the central government has been

attaching equal importance to higher and vocational education to bring up a large group of professionals with specialized skills. But in the 1990s, vocational education was disregarded for many reasons.

Things have changed significantly recently. The central government pays renewed attention to vocational education in response to proposals of various stakeholders.

In 2012, China’s universities recruited 6.888 million students. 2.549 million, or 37 percent, went to higher vocational schools. And 1.423 million chose to purse engineering degrees, or 55.2 percent of the total enrollment of higher vocational schools.

Application- and practice-oriented master programs, especially those in engineering, have gained recognition and great momentum.

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I. Achievements

3. More education investment

Average annual growth of education investment over the 11 years was 18 percent.

In 2012,the education investment reached 4% of the GDP of country.

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I. Achievements

4. Improved teaching quality China began to offer some new and interdisciplinary

programs, such as molecular biology, function materials, resources recycling, engineering of Internet of Things, biomedical engineering.

Some traditional programs have also included new courses into their curriculum, such as clean utilization of coal, extreme manufacturing, automatic process control, information technology, etc.

such social science and humanities as economics, law, ethics and other courses have been added to engineering programs. Combination of theory and practice is being discussed and enhanced.

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I. Achievements

5. Educational reform The new teaching mode emphasizes student & demand

orientation, comprehensive engineering training and holistic transformation of the curriculum system.

The Outstanding Engineers Educating and Training Program (the outstanding Program for short), which was initiated in June 2010.In the four years after the program was initiated, 210 institutions of higher learning have established nearly a thousand university-level engineering practice centers with businesses in different sectors, involving 30,000 students. About ten thousand employees of over 6,000 enterprises were engaged in engineer development as part-time instructors.

CDIO and PBL concepts introduced from abroad but adapted during localization. For example, Shantou University integrated professional ethics into CDIO as needed to make it more comprehensive.

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I. Achievements

6. International cooperation A lot of universities in China have established relation with

foreign counterparts and are now cooperating with them in various ways from irregular/regular visits, experience exchange, student/visiting scholar exchange to collaborative education, mutual recognition of degree and joint degree awarding.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities are taking in more and more foreign students. At present over 150,000 overseas students are studying in China.

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II. Weak points

1. Imbalance between supply and demand• on one hand, many college graduates find it difficult to get a job. on the

other hand, many businesses could not recruit the right persons they need. The imbalance include two aspects: totality and structure.

2. Homogeneity of goals and patterns In china, the institutions of higher learning are classified in many ways,

such as, vocational colleges, general universities and 211 universities and then 985 universities, top and non-top universities (internationally, nationally and provincially). Such classification is closely related to the administrative ranks of those institutions and their presidents as well as the fund and support they could get.

some universities of technology are in hot pursuit of theoretical scientization and ignore their own characteristics and philosophies.

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II. Weak points

3. Lack of practice• Internally, the experimental conditions on campus are obviously

insufficient, and experiment groups contain more and more members, decreasing the opportunities for students to do experiments personally.

• Externally, the weak connection between schools and businesses disables students to go outside to contact manufacturing facilities and equipments.

4. Curriculum system not aligned with the characteristics of engineering

• Basic courses, and a significant part of specialized elementary courses, are organized based on the philosophy of scientific education to ensure completeness of the subject, rather than customized as needed by engineering practice. The specialized courses, focusing on technologies and analysis, are based on reductionism and do not reflect systematic and holistic approach of engineering.

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II. Weak points

5. Insufficient importance attached to innovation and entrepreneurial education• in recent years, only about 1 percent of college

graduates (more among engineering graduates) started their own businesses, implying weak entrepreneurial education in universities and lack of innovation spirit in students.

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II. Weak points

6. Poor competence mix Because there are no logic and communication courses

in middle schools and universities and exam-oriented education is still prevailing, students’ comprehensive thinking ability, interpersonal skills, the ability to raise questions independently and hands-on capability are poor.

Academic misconducts have negative impact on students, depriving some of them of independent personality and the spirit to seek the truth. They learnt to behave against the code of conduct, cheating in exams and theses. This is worrisome.

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III. Outlooks

• The National Outline for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) issued by Chinese government provides a roadmap for China’s education till 2020. actually each part of it has impact on engineering education.

• In light of China’s process of modernization and the Outline, we forecast that:

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III. Outlooks

1. Competition between universities will intensify and the supply-demand imbalance will be alleviated• Given the changes in demographic structure, the

number of students began to decrease several years ago.

• some universities without unique expertise and less perfect in quality will be wed out. The supply-demand imbalance will be alleviated gradually –although it takes time.

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III. Outlooks

2. Differentiation depends on the reform of engineer system and administrative university classification

• The two keys to facilitate the process is i) complete engineer vocational qualification system, which is absent in China now and expected to be established in the near future; and ii) the fact that the administrative level of and resource investment into a university depends on its classification must be changed to eliminate the impetus for assimilation.

3. Quality of engineering education will be improved with a complete quality assurance system

• Education and engineering communities have realized that it is urgent to establish internationally equivalent engineering education quality monitoring and assurance systems. China has been establishing and improving such systems and applying for entrance to relevant international mutual recognition agreements since 2006.

• Over 390 programs have obtained such certificates by the end of 2012.• The “Washington accord” accepted China as the member in June 2013.

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III. Outlooks

4. Industrial transformation will be conducive to joint talent development by universities and businesses

• On the one hand, legislation shall be facilitated to define businesses’ social responsibilities in talent development. On the other hand, universities should send their students to enterprises to benefit both the students and such enterprises, realizing a win-win result.

5. Instructors will be the mainstay of educational reform

• The justifications should be clarified to instructors to motivate them to change their ideas, learn from local and international best practices and carry out reform based on the realities of the school and program.

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III. Outlooks

6. Quality of students should be improved in many different ways

• Ethic education should be integrated into all activities of students to help them build correct outlooks on life, value and the world and develop independent personality and good quality.

• The fundamental solution to resolve poor quality of students is changing the long-existing exam-oriented education system in elementary and secondary schools, which requires all the stakeholders, including government, schools, parents and students, to change their ideas and realize that “everyone could become a talent” and “every sector is needed”, and requires the existing interest chain to be broken off.

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As China’s modernization accelerates, the quality of its engineering education will be getting better and better.

The foregoing contains both short and long-term tasks, as well as the problems exclusive for China and common in all countries.

We expect to work closely with foreign colleagues to improve the quality to turn out engineering talents meeting the demand of national development.

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Conclusions：


Thank you for your attention!

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china’s engineering education: situation

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