THE PROBLEMS WITH THE COLLEGE ELITE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN CHINA

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:The main mission for colleges is to educate and develop talents for the industry and country. It conducts education for both the elite and the mass (Trow, 1973). This is especially the case for research universities, which has the duty to nurture innovative scholars, highly trained managers, and high quality all-rounded talents. Colleges have to train all-rounded talents who can meet the demands of both the international and national markets.From the end of the 19th century to the start of the 20th century, China's higher education industry has experienced lot of changes (Li, 2014). It has gone through century of exploration and development. China is currently heading toward the direction of transforming itself into an innovative country. Under such circumstances, colleges are not only base for training talents; it also plays an impor tant role in the construction of an innovative state (Cao, 2014). Thus, it is important for colleges to continuously innovate on their education system to ensure that they can train talents who meet the demands of the ever -changing market.To meet the market's demand for both mass education and elite education, Chinese universities have started series of elite programs targeted at gifted students. These universities require all fresh intakes of the year to take part in an examination, and they will enroll the group of best students of the cohort in the elite education program. These students will then go through an educational curriculum that is different from the other students who are not enrolled in the program.Hitherto, there is lack of empirical research that investigates the effectiveness of such programs. Thus in this research, we aimed to investigate the soundness of the prevailing elite education curriculum in China, and we aimed to give recommendations for colleges to consider for their future elite programs management. Toward this end, we conducted case study research on one of the China's top universities in the Jiangsu Province. In specific, we conducted case study research on their elite education program, which is known as the Cultura l Foundation Strengthening Program (hereafter, CFSP; also known as wen-qiang-ban in Chinese). We believed that the findings of this research have important implications for college elite education programs in general, and we believe that it can provide the scientific bases for future educational management policies.LITERATURE REVIEW:In this section, we will review the Western and Chinese elite education program literature. We divided this section into three parts: what defines elite education program; what has went wrong in elite education program; and what can we do to elite education program.What Defines Elite Education Program?China's education system has experienced lot of changes in the recent decades (Li, 2014). To meet the country's increasingly diverse market demands, the Chinese universities provide both elite educati on and mass education. By elite education, we refer to the selective education system that is based on the aim to develop the knowledge, skill, ability, and ethics of gifted college students (Liu, 2003). And by gifted college we refer to the group of top performers in batch of college intake. Elite education system is popular in higher education institutions (Trow, 1973).Elite education program is different from the mass education program in two aspects: its pedagogy and ideology. In Wu and Chen (2008), the authors reviewed the systems of college elite education program. The authors found that such programs have the common goals of pursuing excellence and nurturing high -quality talents. Renowned universities in China have based their pedagogy, educational system, and management system on this common goal. They believe in the need to strengthen the knowledge foundations of reduce the degree of specialization of and customize curriculums according to the needs of students, and the need for a broad curriculum to build solid knowledge foundation for students. …