Summary

China's latest batch of approved joint programmes and institutes have been announced by the Ministry of Education. Approvals included 36 new joint degree programmes with overseas universities at the bachelor's degree level and above plus two joint institutes offering an additional 8 programmes. The new partnerships will start to recruit students in the 2019-20 academic year.

As in previous years the broad field of engineering makes up the largest portion of approved programmes, accounting for almost half the new approvals. But one notable change with previous rounds of approvals is that seven of the newly-approved partnerships were in the arts, including three programmes in visual media design and two in music as well as one in each of animation and environmental design. The third most popular subject area was science, with four individual joint programmes plus a joint institute offering another four programmes in this field, while three new partnerships have been approved in finance-related subjects.

Four of the partnerships involved UK institutions, all at bachelor's degree level: a partnership in biomedical engineering between the University of Dundee and Northeastern University in biomedical engineering; a partnership in animation between the University of Bradford and Qingdao University of Science and Technology; a partnership in electrical engineering & automation between the University of Northampton and Nanyang Institute of Technology; and a partnership in tourism management between the University of Lincoln and Guizhou University. However, the leading country in the latest batch of approvals is the United States, whose institutions were responsible for 16 joint programmes and one joint institute.

Analysis by Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst, British Council International Education Services

China's Ministry of Education issues two batches of newly-approved TNE programmes each year. This batch of programmes comes from the round of assessments conducted in the second half of 2018 but was only announced in late March 2019.

The volume of approvals is fairly similar to previous rounds, suggesting that the overall approval environment for transnational education has not changed substantially. However, the approval of three programmes in finance contrasts with previous trends where this field was seen as oversupplied and it was difficult to receive approval for a new joint degree programme; it is not clear whether this represents a change in policy at the Ministry of Education. In contrast business and administration (which is a separate field in China's subject classification system) still appears to be tightly restricted with only two new programmes, both in niche areas: agricultural economic management and tourism management.

The large number of US partnerships - who represented 39 per cent of all approvals in this round - cements this country's position as China's leading TNE collaborator, having overtaken the UK last year. This may be a reaction to slower growth in direct student recruitment as a result of domestic policies in the US.

Sources

MoE – Announcement of Sino-Foreign Co-Operative Education Programmes Approved in the Second Half of 2018: http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A20/moe_862/201904/t20190403_376582.html (in Chinese)

MoE – Ministry of Education Approves Establishment of the SDU-ANU Joint Science College, Shandong University: http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A20/moe_862/201904/t20190403_376583.html (in Chinese)

MoE – Ministry of Education Approves Establishment of the Detroit Green Technology Institute, Hubei University of Technology: http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A20/moe_862/201904/t20190403_376584.html (in Chinese)