A Policy Overview of Quality Assurance for Sino-Foreign Cooperative Education Programs in the New Era

In quest of input of world-class educational resources and narrowing down the gap between Chinese higher education institutions (HEIs) and world-class universities (WCU) overseas, an increasing policy concern on sino-foreign cooperative education programs is to promote the quality assurance reform of discipline construction and management system mechanism within HEIs, with an emphasis on changing from quantity to quality for sustainable quality development. Whereas the emerging quality issues like bilateral inconsistent academic standards, repeated cooperation in low-cost disciplines; profit-driven activities; insufficient input of foreign educational resources; lowered enrollment criteria; various disorders in financial management; and no exact assessment standard for programs, pertinent policies and documents issued and updated dynamically from Notice on Reviewing Transnational Cooperation Programs and Institutions to the National Medium and LongTerm Educational Reform and Development Planning Outline of 2010. This study delineates and evaluates the landscape of policy implementation via text analysis, to propose possible future research agenda on programs.