Research In China’s Provincial Higher Education Competitiveness

Higher education competitiveness is an important cornerstone of national competitiveness, and regional higher education is the perpetual motion machine to enhance regional economic competitiveness. With reform in higher education management system and the expansion of the scale of higher education, higher education in China shows the characteristics of regional development, and it plays a more prominent role in regional economic and social development. To effectively enhance the provincial competitiveness of higher education, to promote the co-ordination between provincial higher education and regional economic and social development, and to make a whole plan of regional higher education development are important theoretical and practical issues relating to the development of higher education in China.With the competitiveness of provincial higher education as the object, the study has adopted the multi-disciplinary perspective of management, economics, and education and followed the framework of national competitive advantage theory, non-balanced development theory, the principles and model of higher education external relations theory. The project has studied the basic concepts and elements, constructed the theoretical model, set the evaluation index system of higher education competitiveness, analyzed the provincial differences, regional polarization, coordination degree and influencing factors in provincial higher education competitiveness, and finally has proposed countermeasures to enhance provincial higher education competitiveness, and to promote the coordinated development of higher education.This study has first of all analyzed the elements of higher education competitiveness and has found the basic elements of provincial higher education competitiveness:elements of scale, resources, quality and efficiency. Then analysis has been done on the important factors that affect how higher education system runs and functions and the main factors of provincial higher education competitiveness have been found. Based on factor analysis, drawing on Porter’s national competitive advantage theory, the diamond model has been constructed for the evaluation of provincial higher education competitiveness. Based on this diamond model, a four-dimensioned three-leveled evaluation index system of40indicators has been built. With the help of this system, the overall competitiveness ranking and competitiveness elements ranking have been obtained. After cluster analysis of competitiveness, the31provinces have been divided into seven classes in accordance with the degree of competitiveness. The study has found that China’s provincial higher education competitiveness in different areas is greatly unbalanced. The study has found the regional agglomeration of the unbalanced regional development and found the growth pole phenomenon in China’s higher education. There exist seven "regional higher education growth poles" in the eastern, central and western areas:1) North China’s Beijing-Tianjin growth pole;2) East China’s Jiangsu and Shanghai-Zhejiang and Shandong growth pole;3) Central China’s Hubei-Hunan growth pole;4) Northwest China’s Shanxi growth pole;5) South China’s Guangdong growth pole;6) Northeast China’s Liaoning growth pole;7) Southwest China’s Sichuan growth pole. Judging from the degree of polarization and the growth pole’s function intensity upon the radiated areas, we can find the east-central-west gradient distribution. Since the higher education competitiveness in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu is significantly ahead of that in other provincial areas, Beijing, Shanghai-Jiangsu can be regarded as two national higher education "growth poles"The study has built a model of the provincial higher education coordination and found the basic differences between the internal elements of provincial higher education and different types of coordination between provincial higher education and the economic society’s development. The findings are:1) based on the internal coordination degree of provincial higher education, the development of provincial higher education can be classified into five types as internal coordinated, quality-oriented, scale-oriented, efficiency-oriented, and resource-oriented;2) based on the development of internal and external coordination of provincial higher education, there are five types of provincial higher education:developed coordination, developed disharmony, medium coordination, backward coordination and backward disharmony.Analysis has been done to the main factors, general factors and minor factors causing the extremely unbalanced development of China’s provincial higher education competitiveness. For the planned economy, the main influencing factors rank as system&policy and economic development, while the main influencing factors for the market economy take the order of economic development, system&policy. The general influencing factors are history and culture, and the minor factors are population and the environment.Based on previous findings about the distribution of provincial competitiveness and differences in the status quo, imbalance and regional polarization, characteristics of regional external coordination, the main problems and their influencing factors and their root causes, the study has proposed corresponding countermeasures for upgrading provincial higher education competitiveness, promoting the non-balanced coordination of the higher education development among provinces and promoting the internal coordinated development of provincial higher education.