According to officials speaking at the China-foreign Cooperation University President Forum held in Ningbo in late April 2015, China now has 7 branch campuses, more than 40 joint institutes and over 2,000 joint study programmes in China, located in 19 provinces and 3 municipalities. There are currently around 550,000 enrolled students, with 1.5 million total graduates to date.

Cen Jianjun, Director-General of the Ministry of Education’s Department of International Cooperation and Exchange, noted that the graduates from joint programmes and branch campuses benefit greatly from the multicultural environment and play an important role in China’s education internationalisation. However, he said that joint programmes/institutes should do more to adapt to local conditions and industry development needs rather than simply ‘cut and pasting’ foreign courses (e.g. using local case studies) and called for more innovation in classroom systems and teaching principles.

Sources: http://www.chinanews.com/edu/2015/04-24/7232859.shtml, http://news.xinhuanet.com/edu/2015-04/27/c_127736566.htm

Analysis by Liu Xiao xiao, Education Services Manager and Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst

China continues to encourage Chinese-foreign cooperation in both the higher and vocational education sectors, and there is still opportunity for UK institutions to get involved here. However, more focus on quality and innovation has been put in place for new approvals in recent years. How to really integrate the overseas courses with the Chinese courses to enable China to really learn the core value of overseas courses and bring benefits to the local industry development is emphasised. In addition, the Ministry of Education discourages the ‘chain store’ model where an overseas university sets up many similar programmes with different Chinese partners, given concerns on its capacity in high quality delivery with limited resources. High quality joint programs/institutes are strongly encouraged in less developed regions of China and in fields that are related to national or local priorities and emerging industries.