China Preparing to Make University Students Pay Some Tuition

China is planning to develop a new set of rules for financing higher education under which university students for the first time will be at least theoretically responsible for paying tuition, a Chinese Ministry of Education spokesman said Wednesday.

At a press conference called to explain a new Communist Party policy statement on education reform, officials said it is not yet clear how much students will be required to pay or when the new tuition rules will take effect.

The practical impact of the new policy may be limited, because most Chinese students will continue to get government grants or scholarships to pay their tuition--just as, in the past, government grants have paid for most of the costs of students’ food and textbooks while they attend college.

Nevertheless, the tuition requirement does represent a philosophical change from the practices of the last three decades, when students at China’s institutions of higher education automatically got free tuition.

$700 Annual Cost

Chinese education officials estimate that it now costs the government about 2,000 yuan (about $700) a year to educate a university student in China. There are 560,000 students in institutions of higher education this year.

In recent years, many students have been asked to contribute some money, such as 50 to 100 yuan (about $17.50 to $35), to help pay the costs of food, textbooks and other incidental expenses at college.

Because students have already been paying these amounts, a Chinese Ministry of Education spokesman contended at Wednesday’s press conference that the new tuition requirement does not represent a fundamental shift. “One cannot say whether it has been a free or not-free education system,” he said.

Since 1983, some Chinese universities have experimented with a tuition requirement. For example, the newly formed Shanghai University requires liberal arts students to pay 20 yuan (about $7) and science students 25 yuan (about $9) per semester in tuition.

Sense of Responsibility

“Although the sum is a minuscule portion of the state’s contribution to higher education, it helps students develop a sense of responsibility toward their education and the state,” the Guangming Daily, the Communist Party newspaper aimed at intellectuals, said of the tuition requirement in January.

The tuition requirement was included in a policy directive approved by the Communist Party Central Committee earlier this month. The directive said China’s educational system needs to be reformed to help spur the country’s modernization drive.

As part of the reform program, China will also give universities greater leeway to sign contracts with factories or other enterprises for the education of some students. The enterprises will pay for the students’ tuition and other expenses and the students will then work for the enterprises after graduation.

Education officials said universities will also be empowered to admit a greater number of students outside China’s centralized system of education planning who will pay all of their own education expenses. Officials said Wednesday that they could not estimate how many students now finance their own educations, but the number is believed to be extremely small.