Organizational Research On Quality Guarantee Of Gansu Higher Education

Quality has risen to greater prominence in the popularization of Chinese higher education, to which Gansu, an underdeveloped province, still has a long way to go. Gansu higher education is faced with two arduous tasks, namely scale expansion and quality enhancement, neither of which should be overemphasized at the expense of the other. From the angle of organization, this paper discusses quality guarantee in the scale expansion of Gansu higher education.This paper consists of five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the origin, the significance, the scale and the range of the research, as well as the definition of some basic concepts. The second part deals with a brief review of Gansu higher education expansion, and the characteristics of its development, such as weak economic support, vague or distorted information, obvious duality structure of higher institutions, lack of competition in internal and external environments and so on. Furthermore, three influential factors are summed up: conflicting outlooks on quality, lack of resources, and management. The third part is an analysis of the present situation of quality guarantee organization from both inside and outside aspects. With the emphasis on the analysis of internal quality guarantee organization, the author points out three main problems: 1. The contradiction between conventional management and leaping development of the scale. 2. Such defects in quality control organization of higher institutions as decision-making bodies' lack of strategy and function; executive organs' integration; supervisory organizations' monotonous function and inconsistency of authority and responsibility. 3. Weak quality culture in Gansu higher institutions. All these defects prevent the higher institutions from improving their qualities. The fourth part probes into organizational creation of quality guarantee in Gansu higher institutions. Leaping development calls for leaping management, and the quality guarantee environment asks for the urgent establishment of education-evaluating intermediaries at provincial levels. The last part , the key part of the whole paper, points out basic countermeasures on organizational creation of quality guarantee of Gansu higher education. Drawing on the ideas and experience from enterprise-management, higher institutions should restructure their internal process of quality management from four main aspects: quality management process, quality planning process, quality checking process and quality realizing process. The author also emphasizes that quality culture should be cultivated to support process reengineering of higher institutions.