Sustaining Higher Education Development in China: Perspectives from Young Researchers

• In Event: Sustainability and Equity: Looking into Chinese Students and Researchers

Proposal

Introduction
In 2015, the United Nations released Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sets out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for achieving sustainable development in economic, social and environmental dimensions. Of these 17 SDGs, SDG 4 is related to education and seeks to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN, 2015). In addition to SDG 4, SDG 4.7 calls for the development of skills and knowledge “through education for sustainable development and equitable lifestyles” (UN, 2015).

In China, higher education development has always been a national priority. China has adopted a series of reforms to promote the sustainable development of higher education, including equitable quality of higher education, teacher development, etc. In response to competitive national and international university rankings, most universities in China have set sustainable goals for improving scientific research and publication, expecting young researchers to publish more papers locally and internationally.

At many universities and colleges in China, research productivity is evaluated by the number of papers published with Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Science Citation Index (SCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) or Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The research work is usually evaluated by counting the number of published articles (Xian, 2015). Most of these young researchers have graduated from top universities in China, such as the Project 985 and Project 211 universities. However, these young researchers may be terminated by the ‘six-year-up-or-out’ policy and they encounter tremendous difficulties to meet the expectations of the universities. In this study, we attempted to explore young researchers’ views of their personal experiences and perceptions of the effectiveness of the recent reform on the sustainability of research productivity in China.

Theoretical Framework
The recent reforms in higher education in China call for attention to the sustainable development of young researchers (Wu & Shen, 2016) to improve the research and publishing capabilities of young researchers, their competitiveness, and their sustainable career development. The theoretical framework for this study is making use of a combination of Bronfenbrenner’s (1974; 1979; 1986) ecosystem theory and Blackburn and Lawrence (1995)’s classification of the determinants of research productivity to explore the sustainable research productivity of young researchers in China. In this study, we explored the factors that influence research productivity of young scholars at Chinese universities in terms of the three interactive sub-systems of microsystem, mesosystem and macrosystem, as well as, classified the determinants of research productivity into four aspects, namely (i) demographic attributes, (ii) environmental attributes, (iii) institutional attributes, and (iv) personal career-development attributes.

This study aims to answer two questions: (1) What are young researchers’ personal experiences and difficulties in achieving research productivity at Chinese universities? (2) How can the sustainable development of young researchers and the sustainability of higher education in China be maintained?

Research Method
In-depth, semi-structured interviews with 24 young researchers under the age of 40 were conducted in December 2021 in China. They were specifically selected, because they were from an eastern province (Jiangsu), a central province (Henan), a western province (Gansu) and a municipality (Shanghai) in China and they varied in terms of demographic factors. Generally, interviews lasted for about an hour with each young university researcher. Audio records were transcribed into English for further data analysis. In addition, interview transcripts were sent to the participants for checking and verification. Analysis of interview data was guided by grounded theory. Open coding, axial coding and selective coding of qualitative data were used to identify the theme of the qualitative interview materials according to the analytical framework of the research and the needs of the research question, combined with the context (Creswell, 2014).

Findings and Discussion
From the perspectives of young researchers, the process of research integration is a comprehensive and complex transformation, from microsystem to mesosystem to macrosystem, and systems at each level must be adjusted according to the actual situation. In the fundamental change of policy in the macrosystem and in the change from independent scientific research to teamwork in the microsystem, the processes themselves are full of twists and turns. Problems such as the lack of research funding found by young researchers, the difficulty of publishing papers locally or internationally, the heavy workloads and the lack of research time would ultimately determine the fates of the young researchers in sustainable career development.

This study shows that the research productivity of young researchers is determined by many factors, including personal characteristics and institutional characteristics. There should be much rooms for improvement in the research management system in universities. University administration should provide young researchers with the necessary research supports that create a good research culture, and establish feasible evaluation and effective reward programmes to help them solve difficulties encountered in the processes of scientific research.

Contribution and Conclusion
This study contributes that higher education can be regarded as an ecosystem. Academic researchers not only provide a new field of research, but also guide the practice and research process of higher education with a sustainable and coordinated ecological concept. The sustainable development of higher education not only contains a variety of different subjects and organisations, but also nests with the entire organizational environment and cooperates with other systems to maintain the consistency of university-running goals and objectives. The academic evaluation system centres on scientific research and production plays an important role in the research capability and sustainable development of young researchers. We have to recognize that the sustainable development of young researchers also promotes the sustainability of higher education in China. In the future, the focus of research should take care of the entire university evaluation system from the perspective of education ecology, and deeply analyse the ecological effects, ecological advantages and institutional ecological construction in the institutional field.

Authors

• Nicholas Sun-Keung Pang Sun-Keung Pang, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University

• Huanchun Chen, East China Normal University