Four programmes jointly run by Chinese and foreign universities were punished by the Ministry of Education for admitting students beyond the enrolment scale, according to a notice on 18 March on the website of the Ministry of Education. The four programmes, based in Tianjin University of Technology, Henan University of Technology, Jilin University of Finance and Economics and Heilongjiang's Heihe University, were asked to reduce the number of students they will recruit or even stop recruiting. The problems of these programmes were found in the nationwide evaluation and appraisement of programs jointly run by Chinese and foreign universities. The inspection was started by the Ministry of Education in early 2013, to examine and improve the teaching quality and standards of the programs cooperatively run by universities here and abroad. The notice said a total of 346 institutions and programmes were examined, and 83 percent of them were qualified.

It is clear that China’s Ministry of Education is paying more attention to the quality of joint programmes and sees quality as being vital to the sustainable development of trans-national education in China.