Research On Collaborative Governance Of Cross-area Higher Education

Since the 21st century, China's higher education has achieved great development due to merger and expansion of universities. The extensive growth, however, brings about serious issues:the disparity of higher educational integral levels in areas is fairly prominent; some education resource-rich regions concentrate only on the expansion of scale of colleges and universities but not the quality; meanwhile resource-limited regions cannot afford further development of higher education. Therefore the National Outline for Medium and Long-term Educational Reform and Development (2010-2020) proposed to explore inter provincial collaboration and reformation on higher education, establish cross-area educational cooperation mechanism, and encourage cooperation in jointly running schools; try to overcome the predicament in higher education, promoting the common development of the higher education in every area. In this context, the research on cross-area higher educational collaborative governance would contribute to the development of national higher education.The thesis starts from the review of theories, puts forward the definition of collaborative governance and its features. Then it analyses 3 types of collaborative governance (bureaucracy, market and network) and 3 patterns (union of local governments, joint conference and intergovernmental contract).In the next place, the article classifies the higher educational collaborative governance into central government dominative mode, local government dominative mode and interschool mode. And it reveals the fact that insufficient motives, limited cooperation depth and imperfect mechanism compose the current predicament, and the causes of it are the central government's excessive centralization, local governments' localism and unreasonable benefit distribution.At last, based on the theory of collaborative governance, suggestions on the predicament are proposed:establish support and guarantee mechanism, contact and dialogue mechanism as well as resources integration and sharing mechanism.