Higher Vocational Education Quality Standards

The classification of higher education makes it imperative for higher vocational education to grow in a massive way. However, the increase in the number of colleges for higher vocational education in China has not led to the improvement of quality, but the opposite is true. Among the causes are vague training objectives, under-qualified workforce, poor-quality enrollment and academics-oriented quality standards, to name a few. In the author's eyes, diversification is a must for the classification of higher education, and it calls for diversified training objectives, talent specifications and quality standards as well. But the truth is that academics-oriented standards are taken for granted in a "one-size-for-all" way. As far as the standards of higher vocational education concerned, no definite connotation, and no differentiation between general and vocational higher education. The literature is rich in the topic about the change of standpoint on quality, but poor in the attention paid to the discrepancy of quality between the two. But compared with general higher education, higher vocational education is another type of education but not another level, therefore. There are more than one differences between them, and these differences present themselves in different quality standards.For the above-mentioned reasons, my dissertation gives a definition to the quality standards for higher vocational education, makes some differentiation between the two, and works out a framework for the quality standards of higher vocational education in a multi-discipline way, with a case study afterwards.All my propositions and explanations are made in the six chapters:Chapter One gives some explanations to higher vocational education and its quality standards, and the latter is a multi-dimension and -level concept, which is closely related to the extent how the graduates are received in the job market and is a set of benchmarks to describe and assess the students' achievement and competence.Chapter Two probes into the development of the world-wide higher vocational education and its quality standards, deals with three different modes, namely, binary mode, unity mode, and diversification mode, and conducts two cases study taking a German and an American colleges as examples, the focus being on the quality standards.Chapter Three focuses on the theoretical base on which to develop the quality standards for higher vocational education, that is, the standpoint about technology and science. In the author's opinion, technology and science are really closely related to each other and differ from each other in some way on the other hand; professional degree is a degree that shares close relationship with higher vocational education; talents in different fields have different social efficiency, the requirements for different social efficiency lead to discrepancy in the making of knowledge and ability, the expected discrepancy calls fordifferent curriculum, and finally it is easy to understand that different types of education should have their own quality standards.Chapter Four gives some differentiation between the quality standards of the two types of higher education. The differences are shown in property, objective, function, measurement index, the standards setters, and the process and methods to realize the standards.Chapter Five is intended to construct a quality standard system for higher vocational education. My detailed analysis proves that, in the process of standards setting, the functional analysis method and the outcome-based ability building mode enjoy superiority to the traditional task analysis and the input-based ability building mode. And my discovery shows the importance of the role the three aspects play is decreasing in turn, and the order of the three aspects are professional competency, key ability and academic capability.Chapter Six deals with the application of the quality standard system for higher vocational education. After the analysis of the ability-based curriculum developing modes, the auth...