As“The Twelfth Five-year Plan of Chinese Education Development”points out,
“Treating higher education as the key connection between thefirst science pro-
ductivity andfirst talent resource, to speed up the construction of world-class
universities and world-class disciplines. It’s necessary to base the construction on
the discipline development, to further implement‘985 Project’and the project of
innovative platform under advantaged discipline, to further implement‘211 Project’
and project of special and key disciplines.”In our opinion, to Chinese universities,
especially those research-oriented 211Us, the main problems in the next stage are
scale, structure, quality and effectiveness, of which research quality is the most
important. 211Us should stride on the way of“rational scale, optimal structure, best
quality and higher effectiveness”. This is also partly highlighted in the“The Twelfth
Five-year Plan of Chinese Education Development”, which addresses that“higher
education sector should keep on a rational scale, optimize its structure, and enhance
its features, so as to stride on the way of intensified mode centering on quality
improvement”(MOE2012a).
In this book, wefind that the decrease of scale efficiency is the main barrier
impeding the increase of overall efficiency of 211Us. Many 211Us are operating on
the stage of decreasing return to scale, whose scale is not appropriate to be enlarged
further. Therefore, a rational scale is the basis to achieving sustainability in higher
education, and also a useful method to curb the decay of research quality and
insufficiency of funding.
Optimal StructureThere is twofold in optimizing structure:first, course structure
and discipline structure in universities should meet the demand of market, and also
the national strategy and social needs, especially the regional economic and social
needs, to optimize their research system and revolve their research organization, in
order to provide institutional and policy guarantee for the innovative outputs.
Second, it’s necessary to optimize geographic distribution of universities, and in
light of the requirement of economic distribution and urbanization system to perfect
the strategic distribution of universities under key construction or administered by
central government, and enhancing the construction of regional higher education
core, andfinally form a reasonable higher education distributionfit for national
productivity distribution and social needs (MOE2012a).
Best QualityQuality is the lifeline of research university, and it’s associated with
discipline construction, cultivation of researchers, etc. While keeping a rational
scale, a major task for research university is to improve its research quality. Only
the high quality teaching and research can bring those high-level creative talents
and innovative outputs. According to our studies, 211Us don’t perform well in
creating groundbreaking research outputs. For instance, the number of high cited
papers is still very small, and doesn’t grow in a steady pace. Through the analysis of
projection, producing groundbreaking research outcomes is a good way for those
985Us or JUs to improve their research efficiency.
Effectiveness FirstResearch has to pay attention to costs as well as effectiveness.
The research effectiveness of university includes economic cost, as well as social
7.2 Policy Implications 299