Regional Difference in Distribution of China's Colleges and Universities and Its Impact on the Equality in Access to Higher Education/ Difference Regionale de la Distribution des Instituts Et Universites de Chine Et son Impact Sur L'egalite de L'acces a L'education Superieure (Report‪)‬

1. INTRODUCTION Some important changes have taken place in China's higher education since 1990s. First, some reforms have been carried out in the management system, the fee-collecting system and the graduate-assignment system of the higher education. Reforms in management system involve the transference of the majority of higher education institutions controlled by the ministries and committees of the Central Government to the Ministry of Education or the local governments by way of joint reconstruction. Reforms in the fee-collecting system and in the graduate-assignment system have been carried out simultaneously, ranging from total exemption of tuition fees and lodging fees to all-around collection of tuition fees and lodging fees, and from unified graduate-assignment to two-way selection in graduates' employment. Second, students enrollment for higher education has been enlarged. The number of enrolled students was increased from 1.084 million in 1998 to 2.6 million in 2001, up 2.4 times over three years; in 2002, the number of students aged 18-22 studying in higher education institutions accounted for 15%, which shows that higher education in China has reached the mass stage. These reforms have accelerated the development of higher education, yet have also increasingly aggravated the imbalance of development of higher education among different regions. Such imbalance mainly involves the following two aspects: First, across the country, higher education institutions are excessively centralized in several provinces. Taking 2004 as an example, of the 31 provinces, the provinces with the number of higher education institutions ranking the top 6 made up 32% of the country's total, while the number of higher education institutions ranking the last 6 provinces made up less than 6% of the country's total. Second, in terms of the provinces, higher education institutions are mainly centralized in provincial capital cities. Taking 1998, the number of provinces with more than 50% of the higher education institutions distributed in provincial capital cities reached 15, accounting for 56% of the total. Provinces with the number of higher education institutions in provincial capitals making up less than 30% of the provincial total were only Anhui and Hebei Provinces. Thus the question is, What is the impact of the imbalance in the regional distribution of higher education institutions on equal educational opportunities for students?