From Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities to Equal Development: An Analysis of China’s Preferential Policies for Higher Education Institution Admissions

Abstract

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, educational equity has always been the value-oriented cornerstone of China’s educational policy formulation and implementation. With the robust development of higher education over the past 70 years, the Chinese government has launched preferential policies for higher education institution admissions, transforming the policy-making logic from equal rights and opportunities to equal development. In particular, since the National Preferential Admission Policy, the Elite University Preferential Admission Policy and the Local Preferential Admission Policy were successively launched in 2012, a fair system of policies has been established for elite higher education institutions to recruit more students from rural and poverty-stricken regions, marking a new era when the Chinese government highlights the development of fairer and higher-quality education. Compared with the previous preferential admission policies, these new programs evolve from a concessionary policy to an inclusive policy, from a score-based policy to a policy for centralized admissions by universities with high-quality higher education resources, and from a policy for admission of certain individuals to a policy for collective admission on a large scale. In the future, to make such policies better benefit the recipient group, it is necessary to target specific groups of students, increase the number of colleges and universities authorized to implement special programs, strictly carry relevant policies out, and care about the development of students from disadvantaged backgrounds according to these admission programs.