A Study On The Quality Of Mass Higher Education

One of the frontier problems in higher education is the higher education quality. It is widelyvalued because the rapid development of higher education brings about diversification of thefunction and the form of higher education, multiplicity of the hosts of colleges or universitiesand internationalization of higher education. Higher education plays an increasingly importantrole in "knowledge economy". Therefore, countries around the world put forward some newstandards and requirements to the higher education quality and meanwhile strengthen theresearch on it. In China, the gross rate of admittance to colleges or universities reached 17% inthe year of 2003, which marks the stage of mass higher education. Until now, the contradictionsbetween quality and quantity of higher education have been less heated. Accordingly, theimportance of quality assurance and enhancement becomes a major concern. Hence, studies onmass higher education quality also blossom in China. However, it is found that most of theprevious researches focus on quality assurance but there is little profound exploration intohigher education quality itself.As for the status quo of the study on this, this paper, firstly, summarizes previous relativeresearches by employing literature review, international comparison and theoretical analysis andprobes into all-round aspects of higher education: definition, standards and attributes. Secondly,it makes comparative analysis, by employing methods of international comparative analysis,into those problems resulting from the process of mass higher education in those postwardeveloped countries. In this way, we can learn from them, on the one hand, failures, on the otherhand, successful experiences, preventing from going the wrong way when developing our highereducation. Thirdly, there is an analysis of the outside environment for the development of masshigher education quality, which points out that higher education quality has been challenged byenlargement of university enrollment, heated competition system and the coming of the neweconomy and "knowledge revolution". Fourthly, it emphasizes the existing problems andformative reasons and for the assurance and enhancement of mass higher education quality, italso provides some strategies: 1) The notional transition is the ideological guarantee; 2) Theaddition of investment is the material guarantee; 3) The innovation of institution is the systemguarantee; 4) The management of higher education by laws is legal guarantee.The studies on higher education quality are the internal requirement for the promotion of IIhigher education. That mass higher education quality is chosen as the topic of my thesis doesn'tmean that the relative problems exist only in this phase. In fact, there are also quality problemsin the phase of elite higher education. However, it is easy to reach unanimous understandingabout them because of the single form of running a school and the definite beneficiaries.