Reexamine Academic Drift:A Development Path Of Newly Established Colleges

Since the 1950s,the academic drift of non-university higher education institutions has been gradually evolving into a global phenomenon.Concerning academic drift,traditional universities have been rising an unprecedented upsurge of opposition and criticism on the grounds of homogeneity,and the governme nts have been making policies of curbing it to meet diversified demands of society,while non-university institutions of higher education have been persistently pushing forward on the road of academic drift.As an integral part of higher education in C hina,newly established colleges having a major impact on the ecological balance of higher education system have been facing academic drift since the21^st century.Therefore,in order to avoid its negative effects,the state has introduced policies to guide the transformation of newly established colleges to application-oriented.The national policies unexpectedly haven‘t completely blocked the strong academic drift appeal and vision of newly established colleges.Hence academic drift has become a hot research topic.Most researchers analyzed the causes and countermeasures of academic drift from the external objective environment,and didn‘t explore academic drift in the perspective of newly established colleges.This is likely to be the source of the above contradictory situation.This research positions on a basic research,focuses on the rightness of selecting academic drift path of the agents,starts from the assumption that academic drift is the agents‘rational choice,follows the"past,now,future"time clue,upholds the train of thinking in"history,current situation,attribution,pattern",adopts literature research,interview,questionnaire survey,participation observation methods,bases on Bourdieu‘s theory of practice and new institutionalism in soc iology to reexamine four parts of the academic drift in newly established colleges.The first part recalls the academic drift history of newly established colleges from the time dimension;the second part reveals the status quo of academic drift through questionnaire survey and observation from the spatial dimension;the third part analyzes the influencing factor of academic drift through factor analysis,correlation analysis and regression analysis with SPSS20.0.The last part summarizes four models and the roadmaps of academic drift with the help of the model theory consisting of four elements:value goal,structure function,and operation strategy and adjustment mechanism.The findings are as follows:（1）Academic drift is a development path for newly established universities to upgrade into universities according to national policies and standards by adjusting the value orientation,norms and standards,symbols and practical training of academic orientation.（2）Historical research shows that under the influence of external factors such as policy orientation,economic development and social transforma-tion,new established colleges have gone through three stages:upgrading,transformation and applying for master‘s degree programs and changing their names to universities.Newly established colleges have increased their holdings of economic,cultural,symbolic and other capitals,promoted the realization of the popularization of higher education and the development of higher education system through academic drift,which strengthened them view academic drift as a development path.（3）The survey results show that the degree of academic drift in newly established colleges is relatively high in general,but differences exist in various dimensions.The vast majority of colleges positions as an application-oriented college,serves the development of their provinces or industries,but orients to a research university in the middle and long term and the degree of academic drift is mideium;most colleges strive to improve the level of academic degree with actively applying for master’s degree and planing to change their name to university,and the academic drift is relatively high;the specific actions focuses on academic research and the introduction of doctoral tale nts,and the degree of academic drift is very high.（4）The quantitative analysis shows that academic drift is influenced by the habitus of development,competition,management and research,the external fields of national policy,social culture,group behavior and the internal fields of teacher professional development,student enrollment and employment.The fundamental motive force lies in the pursuit of economic,social,academic and symbolic capitals by the agent.The habitus is the main motive,the external field the important environment,and the internal field the important foundation.（5）The model of academic drift is an abstraction and generalization of the occurrence,persistence and development of academic drift,which is a typical theoretical sc hema for describing academic drift.According to the causes and factors,the model of academic drift can be divided into four kinds:the active model dominated by habits,the passive model dominated by external field,the mixed model dominated by internal field and the multi-factor interaction model.Among them,the passive model dominated by the external field is subdivided into two modes:national dominance model and social dominance modal.The active model dominated by college habitus follows the academic logic and the micro autonomous mechanism;the passive model led by the state adheres to the administrative logic and the macro-control mechanism;the passive model dominated by society upholds the market logic and the macro and micro interaction mechanis m;the passive model dominated by the internal field is suitable for the academic logic and the macro and micro interaction mechanism;the mixed model of multi-factor interaction abides by the multiple coupling logic and the macro and micro multiple interaction mechanism.In reality,the mixed model of multi-factor interaction is dominant.（6）Academic drift conforms to the development habitus of newly established colleges,which is conducive to enhancing core competitiveness.Newly established colleges sec lected it as the development path through comprehensive games in many fields,rather than the result of blind imitation.Because of its positive and negative effects,it is not advisable to thoroughly curb or support academic drift in the course of catching up developed countries under the background of international competition,scarce resources,and imbalance of regional higher education.The government should deepen the reform of classified management of higher education institutions,deal with academic drift in a stratified and differentiated way,change the distribution of capital and power in the field and reshape the habits of colleges and Universities which may be a good way to solve the problem of academic drift.