Balancing excellence and diversity in higher education? The role of the Chinese first-level discipline evaluation scheme

ABSTRACT

Balancing excellence and diversity effectively in the higher education sector is one of the most challenging tasks for national governments. While a number of countries around the world have initiated university excellence schemes, it is more difficult to identify policy initiatives that also take into account how institutional diversity is to be enhanced simultaneously. By an in-depth analysis of the voluntary, and later mandatory, first-level discipline evaluation scheme in China from 2003 to 2016, the article discusses possible long-term impacts of this scheme both regarding excellence and diversity in the higher education landscape in the country. In conclusion, it is argued that decentralized decision-making within a centralized evaluation scheme is an interesting governance approach for trying to balance excellence and diversity in higher education. However, institutional diversity is not necessarily positively correlated to disciplinary diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Excellence
• diversity in higher education
• discipline evaluation
• Double First Rate policy
• Chinese characteristics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bjørn Stensaker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2109-4902

Notes

1 In the Discipline Evaluation Scheme their codes of discipline are 0809 (Electronic Science and Technology), 0810 (Information and Communication Engineering), 0811 (Control Science and Engineering), and 0812 (Computer Science and Technology).

2 The amount of 85 million Yuan was roughly equivalent to €10.5 million in 2013 (exchange rate 1 Yuan ≃€12.45)

Additional information

Funding

The China Scholarship Council [201706270064] supported this work.