A new report from EOL, a website operated by a body under China's Ministry of Education, presents an analysis of officially-approved transnational education programmes in the country. The report covers areas such as programme approval trends, the type of Chinese partner institutions, subject areas, delivery models, partner countries, and entry qualifications of incoming students.

Summary & Analysis by Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst, IES

The full report (in Chinese) is linked below, but a summary of key findings includes:

• 90 partnerships were approved in 2019 (16 joint institutes plus 74 individual joint programmes), which is more than the number over the last few years. 21 joint institutes were approved in the first half of 2020 which is a higher number than any previous year.
• More than half of joint institutes offering bachelor's degrees involve a Chinese partner that is a member of the "dual first class" initiative (a funding scheme identifying 137 leading institutions for additional support). However, only around 21 per cent of individually-approved joint programmes are at dual first class institutions.
• The report analyses the subject areas of TNE bachelor's degree programmes involving a "dual first class" partner (including both individually-approved programmes and programmes offered at joint institutes, but not those at joint institutes with independent legal entity such as Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University or the University of Nottingham Ningbo) the top broad subject area is engineering, followed by business/administration and economics. The top three specific disciplines are mechanical design, manufacturing & automation; finance; and civil engineering.
• 47 per cent of joint programmes or institutes involving a dual first class partner offer "4+0" programmes where students spend their entire course in China, while 32 per cent are "3+1" and 11 per cent are "2+2". However, programmes in the latter two groups generally do not require students to go abroad and also offer a 4+0 option. The remaining 10 per cent of programmes are classed as "other", mainly covering courses lasting longer than 4 years.
• Among joint programmes or institutes involving a dual first class partner, around 31 per cent award only a Chinese degree certificate, while 69 per cent award degrees from both the overseas and Chinese partner. Within the latter group 55 per cent of programmes have additional conditions on the award of an overseas degree, such as requiring a period of study abroad.
• The report looks at tuition fees at a selection of joint programmes and institutes involving a dual first class partner and notes that these vary greatly based on factors such as region, partner institution and subject area. The median tuition fee across the whole group is around RMB 30,000 per year, but more than a quarter of partnerships charge RMB 50,000 per year or more.
• Looking at average Gaokao scores of incoming students, the report looks at a sample of 46 TNE majors recruiting students from Zhejiang province. In comparison to non-TNE subjects at the same institution, around 20 per cent of TNE programmes had higher average entry scores while the remaining 80 per cent had lower score requirements than the equivalent domestic programme. The median score difference was in the -6 to -10 point range.
• Looking at graduate destinations, the report looks at two TNE joint institutes compared to their parent institutions. Both joint institutes saw very large proportions of their graduates going abroad for further study (91 per cent and 68 per cent respectively). These percentages were not only significantly higher than the proportion of domestic-programme graduates going abroad, but also higher than the proportion of these graduates progressing to further study in total (including domestic PG courses).

In addition to the above information on joint programmes and joint institutes without independent legal entity, the report also takes a particular look at joint institutes with independent legal entity (sometimes known as "branch campuses"). It looks at each university's planned recruitment scale at the bachelor's degree level, and trends in entrants' average gaokao scores and graduate destinations at some specific institutions.

The summary above highlights the most important findings of the report, but the full report goes into more detail in most of these areas. Institutions that already have or are considering TNE partnerships in China may find this information useful for setting their future plans.

However, readers should note that most of the data in the report focuses on partnerships involving a "dual first class" Chinese university, whereas the majority of TNE is with comparatively lower-ranked partners. Most of the report's tables also do not distinguish between joint institutes and individually-approved joint programmes.

In some areas, such as average fee levels, these factors make an important difference and so UK universities looking to understand TNE in China should also consider information from other sources.

Source:

Report in Chinese: https://www.eol.cn/e_coop/gol/html/report2020/content.shtml