Raising the quality of business degrees

An article by Pallavi Aiyar, Beijing correspondent of the Indian Express newspaper, is an excellent report on the efforts that are being made to improve the quality of Chinese business education. Good salaries help.

• Dr Weiying Zhang, assistant president of Peking University, is the executive dean of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. There, full professors with PhDs from prestigious universities abroad can expect $60,000 a year. Such pay levels are reasonably attractive to overseas academics.
• The official national salary given to a full professor in China today as set by the Ministry of Education (MOE) is 4,000 yuan per month. But the government has permitted individual academic departments to supplement official salaries with private funds that the departments raise through fees and consultancies.

Higher standards of teachers

Several of the research institutes at China’s better universities have a minimum requirement of a foreign PhD for faculty members.

Dual-degrees

Chinese universities are increasingly offering courses wholly taught in English and in collaboration with internationally recognized partners.

• The Guanghua School of Management offers a dual-degree program in English with the National University of Singapore.
• CCER’s MBA (called BiMBA) is jointly offered with Fordham University in New York City, which contributes both faculty and curriculum.
• Tsinghua University’s International MBA is jointly taught with MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

In 1978, only about 1.4 percent of the Chinese population was enrolled in higher education, or held a university degree of some type. Today the figure is close to 20 percent. Currently, some 20 million students are studying in various kinds of higher educational institutions in mainland China.

There are still problems to solve. Michael Pettis, a professor at the Guanghua School of Management and former adjunct professor at Columbia University, said ‘the fundamental problems with Chinese education — an intensive focus on rote learning and an inability to develop arguments’ — remain.

Dr Weiying Zhang said, ‘We still suffer from too much governmental control and have little leeway to implement reforms without cumbersome permissions and procedures.To do something good and experimental invariably means violating government rules.’

Source: Asia Ties Online