The government's financial support project for universities is one of the major sources of funding for university operations and significantly impacts school development. Comparing the financial support policies and specific financial support projects...
The government's financial support project for universities is one of the major sources of funding for university operations and significantly impacts school development. Comparing the financial support policies and specific financial support projects of Korea and China, this study provided an overview of four university financial support projects currently implemented in the two countries. Moreover, this study analyzes the commons and differences in the two countries' financial support projects and sorts out suggestions for improving and developing university financial support projects in the two countries.
Comparison results indicated that both the Korean and Chinese governments’ financial support projects to universities are insufficient in terms of the diversity of support models and supported universities’ professional development. Insufficient diversity is currently the core financial support problem that both Korea and China need to improve. Simultaneously, China’s university financial support projects still have not solved the support fairness. China’s university financial support needs to be further expanded. In contrast, Korea should develop its support project’s autonomy and make a more flexible policy to the supported universities.
The conclusions of this study are Chinese and Korean governments should learn from each other’s excellent experience: To ensure the support’s fairness, China’s finance support projects need to introduce a competitive system and set up a selection system with a university elimination mechanism. In particular, the scale of financial support can be further expanded if all universities above a certain level are supported by using evaluation criteria such as “basic capacity diagnosis” used in Korea’s National Universities Fostering Project. On the other hand, to increase Korean finance support projects’ autonomy, supported universities should introduce a self-examination and self-evaluation system. Moreover, refer to China’s “Double First-Class” project works with third parties to further rationalize grade evaluation and performance standards.