A Study On The Legal Status Of Private Colleges In The Reform Of Educational System In Our Country

Chinese private colleges, which were dramatically developed since the three-decade policy of reform and opening up, have been the indispensable part of our socialist higher education cause both in scale and quality. The development of private universities has important positive effects, such as deepening the reform of higher education system, satisfying the people's diverse needs for higher education and training all kinds of talents for our country. Particularly with the deep implementation of "Private Education Promotion Law" and its implementing regulations, the legal status of our private colleges has been greatly improved. It makes our higher education system full of vigor and vitality, not only promoting the healthy development of our education, economy and social culture, but also promoting the equity and harmony of our society. However, private colleges still faces many problems in the development process. The more prominent one is that the legal status of private colleges are still in a weak position comparing with the governmental colleges, mainly for the inconspicuous status of public legal person, not perfect property rights system and not sufficient school autonomy of private colleges. If these problems cannot be resolved fundamentally, our private colleges will not enjoy the equal legal status with governmental colleges. So the private colleges and governmental ones can not be fair competition under the same conditions. This will not only hinder the process of our popularization of higher education, but also affect the implementation of our strategy of talent power.This paper is mainly divided into three parts. The first part describes the evolution history of the legal status of private colleges in the reform of educational system. After a brief review of our private higher education, we focus on the development of private colleges under the policy of reform and opening up. According to time series, the history of the development of the private colleges is divided into four stages such as rehabilitation, boom, normal development and legal construction. It is obvious that the legal status of private colleges has been unprecedented upgrade within thirty years, and that our government has paid high attention to the development of private colleges throughout the various stages of their development. The second section explains the current situation of the legal status of private colleges. In order to analyze the current legal status of private colleges clearly, the part first describes the unconspicuous status of the private universities as the public legal person from two aspects. One is that the current nature of legal person of the private colleges is fuzzy. Its main representations include that the legal nature of the definition is unclear, legal independence is not strong and the corporate governance structure is not sound. Another is that the system of property rights of private colleges is not perfect, mainly focusing on the inadequateness, ambiguousness, unimplemented of property rights. And secondly, the part expounds the unclear legal relationship of the private universities, mainly focusing both on the relationship between private universities and the government and on the relationship between private universities and their students. At last, the part analyzes the social power of the private universities, mainly for the lack of public law nature and school autonomy. Comparing with governmental universities, the power of private colleges is clearly insufficient such as self-enrollment, independent pricing, professional and academic curriculum setting and academic degree granting.The third one proposes some countermeasures of perfecting the legal status of private colleges. The first step is to improve the public legal person status of the private colleges. The measures of corporate governance include three aspects, which is to clearly define the corporation type, to standardize corporate governance structure of private colleges, and to improve corporate governance system of private colleges. The tactics of the construction of the property right system are to speed up reform of property rights of the private colleges. It is vital to promote the clarification of property rights of the private colleges, to protect the property of independent legal person, and to improve the incentives of the property rights of private colleges to attract more private capital into the private colleges. The second step is to clear the legal relationship of private colleges, dealing with the legal relationship both between private universities and the government and.between private universities and their students. The final step is to safeguard the social power of private colleges by the implementation of the law, the transformation of governmental functions and the expansion of school autonomy.