On The Inevitable Choice Of Higher Education Massification

Regarding practice and theory of higher education massification of the world as the background, this text analyzes the main challenges and strategic policies in the popular process of higher education of our country. It draws the basic conclusion as follows: to develop higher vocational and technical education is the inevitable choice for the reform of higher education and realization of higher education massification in our country. After World War II, with the development of international economy, progress of science and technology, population's sharp increase and social democratization process, higher education is required to go out of " ivory tower ", gear to the needs of the masses, train diversified professional talents and realize the equality and fairness of higher education. In such developed countries as U.S.A., Japan and Great Britain, etc., they have reformed higher education, increased education funds, developed university's scale and expanded the enrollment to make the size of population of higher education run up. All of these promoted the fast development of the society and economy. These countries entered the popular era of higher education successively. Martin Trow, American famous education sociologist, the professor of Berkeley branch school, University of California, according to the reality of higher education development in countries of America and Europe, etc., probed into the question about quantitative change and qualitative change of higher education evolution, put forward the popular theory of higher education. From two degrees like "quantity" and" quality", it divided the development of higher education into 3 stages: " Elite", " Mass ", "Universal". It announced the direction and trend of the world higher education development. Since the establishment of China, especially implementing reform and opening-up, we have made the achievement of world interest in high educational development. With the arrival of era of knowledge-driven economy of world at the end of the 20th century, it is becoming fiercer in competition of national power, which regards education as the base, science and technology as the guide, talents as the foundation. However, high-speed development of social economy in our country does not meet current situations of higher education very much, which is weak in foundation, small in scale, little in number of students. The era calls our country to reform higher education, expand the scale of running a school, reform management system, optimize the structure of education and improve the quality of education. Furthermore, we will try to advance the popularization of higher education rapidly and realize the historical great-leap-forward development of it. In how to move forward the popular process of higher education and realize the popularization of higher education, we mainly face the following challenges: "great-leap-forward development and short of money", "plural social demands and single structure of higher education", "masses educational equality and elite educational privilege", etc. In order to tackle the challenges, our country draws lessons from community college that U.S.A. established, higher special school that Japan set up and the scientific and technological training institute that Germany set up. On the basis of experiences above, our country has made the creative choice—to develop higher vocational and technical education (abbreviate as "professonship"). Higher vocational and technical education is the important component of higher education of our country. Developing professorship actively is the goal of reforming higher education of our country and realizing higher education massification, as well as the inevitable choice of advancing the development of society. The professonship is the result of higher education massification of our country, the motive force of promoting the development of higher education massification too. Through theory innovation and practical exploration of development of vocational and technical education in the past few years, the higher education of this new type is becoming riper and forms its own characteristic and style. It demonstrates the personnel training mode of scientific reservation and constructing ability standard; new trend of promoting the level of running a school, perfecting the education system of the professorship, implementing inside division of labor, expanding the function of running a school, strengthening creative education and pursuing the sustainable development.