The curriculum design of lower-level tertiary public administration education in China: Challenges and redevelopment

ABSTRACT

Although China has witnessed the rapid growth of public administration (PA) education during recent decades, few studies have focused on the practical issues of lower-level tertiary PA education, namely, PA programs in vocational colleges. The methods that vocational PA programs can apply to improve educational quality are a theoretical gap since vocational PA education differs from university PA education. This article introduces the background and summarizes the characteristics and problems of vocational PA education. Based on the authors’ experience and the application of the Degree Qualifications Profile from other vocational programs, this article proposes a new method for comprehensively developing a curriculum. This method acts as a guideline and helps resolve the uncertainty of vocational PA programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Public administration education
• lower-level tertiary education
• vocational colleges
• curriculum design

Notes

1. In China, the academic discipline of PA is called by various names, such as public management, public affairs, social management, social administration, and civil administration (for the reasons why PA has various names in China, see Zhu, 2018). If a graduate with an associate PA degree finds a job position describing the educational background requirement with any of the above terms, he or she can submit an application without having to consider the difference between PA and public management or social management, etc.This paper uses the term public administration in general. If the cited governmental documents, reports, or papers refer to public administration by different terms, this paper follows the terms that they use. Although these terms have academic nuances, they refer to the same discipline in terms of vocational education.

2. In this article, all real-time statistic data about the numbers of programs and the enrollments are retrieved from the online Data center report from the Data Collection and Management System for Training in Higher Vocational Colleges (2019). This is the official database that is open to all readers who have the IP addresses of vocational colleges. See (Li, 2012; Li & Chen, 2011) for more information about how to access and use the database system.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Guangdong Research Funds for the Teaching Reform in Higher Vocational Education [No. GDJG2015030]; Fundamental Research Funds for Young Teachers [No. 18wkpy76];

Notes on contributors

Xuefan Zhang

Xuefan Zhang is an associate researcher in the Center for Chinese Public Administration Research, School of Government, Sun Yat-sen University. He conducts research on public administration theories and public space studies. His recent courses include Public Affairs Management, Urban Management, and Public Administration.

Yanyu Qian

Yanyu Qian is an assistant researcher in the Department of Teaching Affairs, Guangdong Vocational Institute of Public Administration. Her research focuses on the curriculum design of public administration program and vocational education in China.