ERIC Number: EJ1365938
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0258-2236
EISSN: EISSN-2519-593X
Sustaining the Ecosystem of Higher Education in China: Perspectives from Young Researchers
Perspectives in Education, v40 n3 p95-117 2022
The sustainable development of higher education in China has been a key priority for the national, social, economic and political development. Responding to the severe competition in various university ranking systems, most universities in China have set aims to enhance their sustainability in research and publication. There has been a prominent conflict that young scholars are expected to be productive, with publications in academic journals, competitive in receiving national and municipal research grants, and prestigious in the national and international arenas, or they will be terminated by the 'six-year-up-or-out' policy. Recent reform in higher education that calls for a sustainable development for young researchers is a strategy to revert the side effects from global university ranking systems by nurturing young researchers in their early academic lives, enhancing their productivity in research and publication internationally, and enhancing their global competitiveness without harming sustainability in academic development. This research explored (i) the difficulties that most young scholars face in sustainable academic research development, (ii) the factors that enhance or inhibit research productivity of young researchers, and (iii) the work lives in their early-career development in China. A qualitative study was conducted with data obtained from semi-structured, in-depth interviews of 24 young university researchers from three provinces and a municipality in China. Findings show that factors that relate to sustainable research productivity are individual attributes, discipline attributes, institutional attributes and policy attributes. Lastly, suggestions for policy making in higher education and for improving sustainable research development of young researchers in China are provided and implications for future research are discussed.
Descriptors: Sustainable Development, Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Research, Career Development, College Faculty, Faculty Publishing, Teacher Attitudes, Ecology
University of the Free State Faculty of Education. P.O. Box 339, Bioemfontein 9300, South Africa. Tel: +27-51-401-2368; e-mail: PiE@ufs.ac.za; Web site: https://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/pie/index
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A