petoe : A New Multi-Sector Collaboration Mechanism for Engineering Training in China

Abstract

In service to wider national strategies, the Plan for Educating and Training Outstanding Engineers (petoe) is a pilot reform initiative of higher education in China. It is a comprehensive, innovative, and unprecedented national plan putting forward four key tasks to establish a new multi-sector collaboration mechanism in engineering education. The new mechanisms include multi-sector coordination, participatory guidance of industry, joint training based on industry-university collaboration, and supportive policies of central and local governments. The purposes of the plan are to bridge the gap of supply and demand, promote the partnership between university and industry, and enhance the adaptability of engineering education to social and economic development. This paper discusses the above content with a focus on the challenges of Chinese engineering education, key mechanisms, program progress, impacts, and challenges for next steps.

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 World Engineering Education Forum, Dubai, December 3-6 2014. This paper offers an extended discussion and updated statistics released in 2015.

Introduction

Present State and Challenges in Chinese Engineering Education

Engineering education is tasked with training engineers and facilitating engineering technological innovations. Finding itself at the intersection of engineering and education, engineering education is significant to human resources development for sharing some of the common characteristics of general education. Meanwhile, engineering education is prominently characterized by engineering, serving as an important approach to popularizing engineering knowledge, promoting engineering technology, and supporting social and economic development.

In the past 60 years, China has cultivated 40 million engineers and technicians who directly support the formation and development of the national industrial system and helped drastically boost nearly 30 years of rapid economic development of the country. Engineering education is playing an indispensable role in quickening the pace of modernization of China. Engineering education is now a genuine power, given its large scale and high proportion in the Chinese higher education system, with current engineering students and teachers representing over one-third of all students and teachers in higher education institutions. As of 2013, China has 1,077 universities and colleges offering science or engineering programs, or 92% of all higher education institutions. Among them, 572 universities can grant engineering master’s degrees, and 269 universities can grant engineering doctoral degrees. In 2013, the engineering undergraduate students totaled 4.95 million, and total graduates reached 2.87 million in the same year. The number of engineering teachers in Chinese regular institutions of higher learning registers 0.4 million. 1 Nowadays in China, the engineering educational system is tending to be reasonable in adjusting its structure, stabilizing its scale, and gradually improving its quality.

However, there are still many internal and external challenges in engineering education. Regarding internal challenges on university campuses, the biggest problem is a lack of engineering practice and creativity. 2 Many universities are not fully clear on the differences between engineering education, technology education and science education, which often results in training engineering students in the way of science education. 3 In addition, many universities are facing prominent problems such as a lack of engineering background among engineering teachers, limited engineering practice opportunities for teachers and students, and a lack of practical and innovative abilities among engineering students. 4 For the external challenges, there exist prominent problems such as industry-university disconnects. Industrial enterprises have little passion and inadequate participation in the personnel training process since there are few effective polices and economic incentives to support such efforts. The big gap between universities and industries directly results in a so-called structural imbalance in Chinese engineering education. The graduate attributes and performance of engineering students often fail to meet the requirements of industrial enterprises. A large number of college graduates fail to find jobs, while numerous enterprises have difficulty finding the right employees. 5 In addition, the recognition system between engineering education and qualification of engineers has not been set up in most industry professions. In China, engineers have a universally low social status as in many other countries. 6 The diminishing interest of brilliant school-age youths in engineering majors has become worrisome. All these problems severely influence the quality of engineering education.

In all the above challenges, the industry-university disconnect has been the hardest obstacle to promoting quality reforms in the engineering education system. This long-lasting gap in part results from a broader political, economic, and educational background and legacy. Under the former planned economy environment in China, the industry ministries directly steered engineering talent cultivation. In the bureaucratic system of the time, the central government set up ministries for each respective industry to make industry development plans and make guiding decisions in that sector, including the level and type of personnel training they required. As well, these ministries provided resources to universities and colleges, conducted the training process, and directed the assignment of graduates directly into industrial enterprises. In this self-sufficient system, industry ministries established universities and colleges to train engineers and technicians according to their own industrial development plans. Universities and colleges cultivated talents available to the industrial demands. This administrative and financial system closely affiliated the universities and colleges with the industries. During this period, the relationship between government, industry and universities was very close.

With the development of market economy, the closed and self-sufficient personnel system within industries was too rigid to respond to an opening labor market. Along with the restructuring of State Council in 1998, many industry ministries were removed or merged. Meanwhile, a majority of the industrial colleges, except for a few placed under the Ministry of Education, were decentralized to provincial governments. As an alternative, various industrial associations were set up after the reform. These industrial associations have less power and mainly function as advisory bodies, communicating and coordinating institutions within their own industrial fields. They have neither executive powers of government ministries, nor industrial financial resources and responsibilities to drive talent cultivation more directly. The linkage between industries and universities has therefore become weaker and weaker.

For reshaping the connection between university, industry, and government in engineering education, it is highly desirable to consider a new mechanism in the market economy environment to start a systematic transaction in engineering education to serve the new industrial revolution and substantial development in the 21th century locally and globally. The Plan for Educating and Training Outstanding Engineers (petoe) was proposed in response to the above background challenges and listed in the National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020). 7

petoe Overview

Launched on June 23, 2010, petoe was a breakthrough point to accelerate the systematic reform of higher engineering education in China. 8 Its mission is to improve the quality of Chinese engineering education and build a modern higher engineering education system. This plan is committed to pursue excellence in engineering education, thereby providing a solid human resource foundation for industrialization and modernization, while enhancing the national core competitiveness and comprehensive power. In its official documents, petoe states its vision—towards Industry Modernization, towards Globalization, and towards Future Construction. 9 The first statement means it will try to meet the needs of the industrial sector. The second notes that petoe will serve the “Going-global” strategy, to exploit the international market for industry and provide a steady stream of engineering technical personnel with internationally competitive abilities. The third statement emphasizes that petoe should be steered with strategic foresight to prepare candidate engineers to lead engineering development in the future.

The fields of petoe involve both traditional industries and strategic emerging industries. petoe is planning to train on-site engineers, design engineers, and R&D engineers with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree for the future since it is necessary to pay special attention to training talents in advance for forthcoming industrial trends and demands. In petoe’s long-term goal until 2020, about 20% of universities and colleges with engineering programs will participate in the plan voluntarily. More than 10% of undergraduate and 50% of graduate full-time engineering students will participate in petoe programs.

Multi-Sector Collaboration Mechanism in petoe

For linking stakeholders, petoe confirms four basic implementation principles. The first is industry-oriented, which emphasizes the participation of industrial ministries and associations in the process of talent cultivation. The second is industry-university collaboration, which refers to setting up the joint training mechanism by college-enterprise union. The third is implementation by college types, which means to encourage various colleges and universities to participate in the plan. petoe proposes that different educational institutions should focus on training different types of talents. The principle of diversity mode refers to considering the diversity of industry demands for engineers and cultivating engineers in various ways. Following the above principles, petoe lists five key tasks: 1) setting up a new joint training mechanism between universities and industry enterprises; 2) transacting the talent training mode; 3) improving the quality of engineering faculties; 4) expanding the opening of engineering education to the world; and 5) implementing the engineering talent training standards.

Meanwhile, petoe also proposed some specific measures such as: 1) setting up a multi-sector coordination mechanism; 2) establishing National Practice Centers for Engineering Education; 3) reforming the engineering faculty employment, assessment, and training system; and 4) formulating supportive policies to encourage universities and enterprises to participate in petoe.

The highlight of petoe is to set up multi-sector collaboration mechanisms for training engineers. These mechanisms include coordination mechanism of government, participatory guidance mechanism of industry, joint training mechanism based on industry-university collaboration, and policy support.

Mechanism of Multi-Sector Coordination

Coordination or leadership plays a critical role in petoe since central and local government, various industry ministries, hundreds of universities, and tens of thousands of large and medium enterprises have joined this broader partnership. On the one hand, petoe needs support from powerful national policy-making ministries. 10 For instance, in order to encourage industry enterprises to participate in petoe, some incentive policies are necessary such as tax privileges, as well as cost- and risk-sharing policies to protect students during their onsite practice in enterprises. These policies will encourage enterprises to participate in the petoe, essentially worry-free. On the other hand, petoe needs to passively coordinate various industries to participate as cross-discipline learning becomes an intensified trend in engineering technologies. For setting the industrial training standards and training engineers, it is necessary to enhance the communication between different sectors to share best practices with common professional requirements. Third, support from local governmental policies are critical for local universities and colleges. Members of petoe are not only universities associated with central ministries, but also provincial universities and city colleges. Therefore, in addition to supportive policies at the national level, municipal and provincial policies are also very critical.

An effective and well-established organizational framework is also indispensable for coordination in petoe. The organization’s structure includes the following four parties:

The leadership group: Working together with the relevant ministries of the State Council, the Ministry of Education set up a petoe Committee to steer the direction of the plan, set supportive policies, and make other important decisions. Its daily works, run by the Higher Education Division of the Ministry of Education, include drafting working proposals; organizing industrial enterprises, association and expert groups to participate in petoe strategy meetings; and conduct industry surveys. As well, petoe co-organized an Academic Committee jointly by the Ministry of Education and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Twenty academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (cas) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (cae) run this committee to instruct the overall work of petoe.

The coordination group: The Ministry of Education and relevant industry ministries jointly set up a coordination group. It is mainly comprised of heads of department or division of Ministry of Education and the industry ministries. With its head selected from industry ministries, the group is mainly responsible for coordinating the industrial participants; planning, implementing and evaluating the petoe; formulating the industry criteria on talent training; suggesting industry policies and measures; and organizing petoe in the specific industries.

The expert groups: Together with industry ministries, the Ministry of Education invited distinguished industrial and educational experts to join the expert groups that are led by industrial experts. The industrial experts are commonly in-service or recently retired senior engineers and technicians; the educational experts should generally have senior professional titles and a wealth of teaching experiences. The groups are responsible for directing petoe implementation, developing the industry criteria, and demonstrating the professional training proposals. At present, the Ministry of Education has cooperated with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the State Administration of Work Safety, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping Geographic Information, and other ministries to set up working teams and expert groups.

The operational system: In the petoe, universities and cooperative enterprises jointly form Industry-university collaboration agencies to be responsible for the specific talent training processes. In addition, the enterprises should establish “Engineering Education Centres” for students to conduct engineering practice for one year.

Mechanism of Industrial Guidance

petoe plans to gradually set up an institutionalized link between industry and education to enable the education sector to train future engineering personnel according to the needs of industrial development, and through timely alignment of personnel training objectives, structure, levels, and types.

For quality assurance of training, industry directs the general standards of petoe at undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels. These standards are national benchmarks for training future outstanding engineers. Any engineering program that joins in the petoe should follow them. They center on student learning outcomes. For instance, the undergraduate student learning outcomes are given as below: 11

1. Engineering professional ethics, spirit of pursuing excellence, patriotism, dedication and hard-work, social responsibility and humanistic quality;

2. Engineering-related knowledge of mathematics, natural science, economic management and the other humanities and social sciences;

3. Deep concern about quality, safety, efficiency, environment, occupational health and social services;

4. Fundamental engineering knowledge and fundamental theories in specific fields for solid works; a good understanding of producing processes, equipment and manufacturing systems; and a good understanding of professional development status and trends;

5. Understanding of the technology standards, policies, laws and regulations in the specific and relevant industry;

6. Learning abilities to access information and continue professional development;

7. Integrated abilities to utilize scientific theories, analysis and problem-solving methods and technical means to solve practical problems; with an ability to participate in the design of production and operational systems, and with an ability to operate and maintain these systems;

8. Sense of innovation and product development and initial capacity of design, technology and innovation;

9. Skills to manage, communicate, and collaborate in a team and abilities to adapt to the work environments;

10. Initial capacity of response to crisis and emergencies;

11. Global perspective and skill of communication, competition, and cooperation under the international and cross-cultural setting.

Except for the general standards, several industry sectors have already formulated subject-specific standards to guide university training plans. Both industrial and educational ministries jointly issued the industrial training standards. The expert groups are made up of industry ministries, associations, and educational institutions. Firstly, they need to develop the specific professional standards, and identify the critical and related fields and subjects for engineering professional development. Secondly, these groups are obliged to draft the training standards of specific subjects based on petoe general professional standards. These training standards of specific subjects covered all the industrial fields and subjects at bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. If the engineering subject is relevant in various industries with professorial skills across industries, the subject standards will be developed jointly by all fields.

Some industry associations are also considering making close connections between education and profession qualification. For instance, the Association for Mechanical Engineering has developed the Mechanical Engineers Training standards in petoe at three levels. In accordance with the standards, an undergraduate student could be qualified as mechanical trainee engineer if he/she has the abilities the standard required. Similarly, if a graduate student were trained according to the standards at the master’s level and completed an additional two-year period of engineering practice, he/she could be qualified as a mechanical engineer. In this way, the schooling training connects with the professional qualification.

Industry ministries and associations also participate in quality assessment of petoe program. With reference to international best practices, the industry ministries and associations together with the Ministry of Education establish a quality assessment system of petoe to measure the educational outcomes in accordance with the training standards. Industrial quality assessment mainly includes three aspects. Firstly, the working group reviews the training plan of universities to decide whether they have sufficient preparation to join petoe or not. Secondly, they guide and inspect the main elements of the training process. Thirdly, they participate in a follow-up survey of petoe students one year after their graduation. If the students’ learning outcomes in a program fail to fulfil the quality standards, it should withdraw from petoe.

Mechanism of Joint Training by University-Enterprise Union

University-enterprise union is a key approach for success in petoe. We cannot imagine how a university can train excellent engineers without a real engineering practice environment. With the overhaul of the ministries, most of the large state-owned enterprises are charged by the “State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission” of the State Council and are far distanced from the traditional industrial colleges. The links between both sides has become too loose in the market economy. Similarly, those non-state-owned or restructuring enterprises that developed under the environment of the market economy also regard profit and development as their priority. It is beyond all doubts that engineering education should encourage enterprises to provide real environments for engineering practice.

petoe pushes to set up a cluster of university-enterprise unions to jointly train future engineers. petoe divides engineering learning into two gradual phases: on-campus learning in universities and on-site learning in enterprises. They are equally important. The latter requires students to learn in enterprises for about one year during their whole learning process. Except for learning advanced technology, the students should learn corporate culture, combine design work with actual production, and participate in technological innovation and engineering development. The students should also learn engineering professionalism and ethics from authentic engineering practice.

The joint training relies on the Practice Center for Engineering Education, the integrated training platform established in enterprises. These centers expanded their functions based on those previous practice bases. The main tasks of these centers include drafting training proposals together with cooperative universities, constructing the curriculum system especially focused on enterprise learning and practice, and arranging the one-year practice learning placements for students. Now a batch of such centers has already been formed.

Supportive Policies

In order to support and ensure petoe implementation, the Ministry of Education and related industry ministries have formulated a series of relevant policies. In January 2011, the Ministry of Education issued the following supportive policies in the Guideline of petoe: 12

• Preferential policy of enrollment: Supporting more quota allocation of colleges to develop professional degree programs, especially at the master’s level; ensuring the quality of students joining the petoe program; and implementing flexible enrollment management and retaining admission qualification for those students who intend to take internship or employment in enterprises for 1-2 years before their graduate study.

• Policy of faculty recruitment and performance assessment: Supporting colleges and universities to reform the rules, standards and approaches of engineering teacher recruitment, assessment and training; and considering an engineering teacher’s performance and promotion from various perspectives such as project design, patents, industry-university collaboration, and technical services instead of thinking only research and publications.

• Priority policy to the program applications in the field of emerging strategic industries.

• Priority policy for international exchange for students and teachers in petoe programs: Giving priority to fund the students of petoe program, including government-sponsored funds for overseas study, internship, and exchange learning; giving priority to fund the youth to train in cross-national enterprises; giving priority of government scholarships to fund foreign students to complete engineering education in China; increasing government scholarship quotas to the independent recruitment program in petoe; and giving priority to petoe universities to develop Chinese-foreign cooperative education programs.

• Priority policy for petoe enterprises in continuing education: Supporting engineers in petoe enterprises for their continuing education; supporting on-the-job training in theoretical knowledge and operational skill of in-service engineers to help enterprises keep pace with the development of new technologies and new equipment; supporting enterprises that set up national and provincial centers to enhance their in-service engineers’ education levels and giving priority to enroll engineers working in these enterprises in engineering master’s programs; encouraging enterprises with the national Engineering Education Center to develop in-service engineering doctoral programs with cooperative universities; and giving enrollment privileges to petoe universities to offer engineering graduate education for petoe enterprises.

• Priority policy of petoe student employment: According to the agreement between enterprise, colleges, and students, petoe enterprises have the priority to employ students graduating from petoe programs.

Additionally, some industry ministries and associations have developed specific policies such as related to part-time teacher incentives, and student incident insurance in order to encourage the enterprises to join petoe. For example, together with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Housing issued the guideline policy to strengthen the students’ practice in enterprises. Together with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Transport issued the supportive policy in maritime education and founded the joint mechanisms of navigation engineering education. The Ministry of Treasury is conducting a survey and formulating preferential tax policies for accepting internships. The Ministry of Land and Resources and the China Earthquake Administration have put petoe tasks into the industrial talent development plan.

The Progress and Challenges of petoe

petoe attracts a large number of participants and resources. By the end of 2014, 208 universities enrolled 250,000 undergraduate and graduate students to study in petoe programs (Table 1). In 2013-2014, the financial input from university and enterprises has reached nearly 5.9 billion yuan (rmb).

table 1

The student enrolment of petoe programs (2010.6-2014.12)

sources: statistics of the ministry of education, china, 2015. data of some colleges are not included.

By the end of 2014, 10,415 enterprises joined petoe, including 5,359 large enterprises and 5,056 high-tech enterprises. 13 Together with 23 ministries of the State Council, the Ministry of Education has preliminarily selected 626 enterprises as National Practice Centers for Engineering Education. Table 2 presents further details.

table 2

The enterprises contracted with petoe (2010.6-2014.12)

sources: statistics of the ministry of education, china, 2015. data of some colleges are not included.

In addition, in 2010-2014, 11,487 part-time faculties from enterprises have participated in teaching in the petoe, and colleges and universities sent 4,972 full-time teachers to enterprises to enhance their experience with industry practice. Table 3 shows the specific statistics including the total numbers of part-time lecturers, their participating curriculum, teaching hours, and weeks of graduate design instructed by enterprise lecturers.

table 3

The industry-university exchange of full-time and part-time teachers in petoe (2010.6-2014.12)

sources: statistics of the ministry of education, china, 2015.

petoe has powerfully pushed forward the reform of Chinese engineering education in recent years. The new multi-sector collaboration mechanism for talent cultivation has become a model in higher education in China. Based on this model, some provincial governments have launched local plans for city colleges. The model also produced a series of similar plans in other specific fields. For example, the Ministry of Education launched five similar plans: “The Outstanding Doctor Training Plan”, “The Outstanding Legal Talent Training Plan”, “The Outstanding Teacher Training Plan”, “The Outstanding Forestry and Agricultural Talent Training Plan” and “The Outstanding News Media Talent Training Plan”.

Although petoe has great accomplishments to date, the following problems still need to be solved. First, the funding from both the public and private sectors are relatively insufficient, and there still exists an imbalance of resources in various universities and enterprises. Second, some industries have not set their own subject-specific standards for talent cultivation, which has affected the adaptability of university program training plans. Third, the new system of evaluating engineering teachers has not been set up in many universities, which has affected greatly the enthusiasm of teachers and part-time lecturers to pay more attention to teach in petoe program. Moreover, some ministries have not issued the supportive policies for petoe according to the original plan, which will restrict further development of petoe. The above problems show that it has been very complicated and difficult to form new multi-sector collaboration mechanisms in petoe.

As mentioned above, the problems of Chinese engineering education, and especially the big gap between university and industry, resulted from a variety of political, economic, and educational reasons. It is impossible to solve these problems only by efforts from a single side. The government, industry enterprises, and universities are indispensable driving forces to the reform of engineering education. Especially given the background of China, in order to maintain and enhance the partnership and multi-sector collaboration petoe established, the industry ministries in central and local government should play critical roles in policymaking and need to speed up to finalize and issue supportive policies. Meanwhile, the universities, industry associations, and enterprises need to make specific internal policies to support national/provincial Practice Centers for Engineering Education and reform the system of performance assessment to attract quality engineering teachers and part-time lecturers to join the petoe programs.

Conclusion

As a mission-oriented educational plan in the new century, petoe grasps the essential elements of quality engineering education and directs universities and colleges in the right way to remove obstacles to reform in Chinese engineering education. In other words, this plan is trying to reconstruct the engineering talent cultivation system via multi-sector collaboration. The stakeholders such as universities, ministries of State Councils, industry associations, and enterprises have been deeply involved in this reform. Although facing many challenges, this plan and other similar plans are changing the profile of Chinese higher education at a historical turning point. Yet it is too early to be overly optimistic about petoe. There is a long way to go to enhance the quality of Chinese engineering education due to its large scale and its complex historical factors.