江苏留学网

Students from Yangzhou University work on 3D modeling for buildings in a local park. [Photo/jsenews.com]

Cultivating more high-level and competent students is a top priority in Jiangsu province's postgraduate education sector, local media reported on July 30.

To achieve this goal, Jiangsu has rolled out several targeted measures, including enrolling students from "double first-class" institutions, as part of a national project to nurture an elite group of world-leading schools.

Statistics show that 37.77 percent of postgraduates enrolled in 2019 were graduates from double first-class schools, and 34.6 percent of master's and 63.9 percent of doctoral students were from these schools.

"Jiangsu has prepared a generous budget for postgraduate education, growing by an average of 7 percent every year and reaching 4.3 billion yuan ($614 million) in 2020," said Ge Daokai, director-general of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education.

To make every penny count, the province led the way in launching a comprehensive evaluation system for postgraduate education. A total of 36 schools were included in the pool, evaluating their efforts in moral education, teacher training, reform, and teaching quality.

The province has also tightened qualification inspection for graduation. Master's and doctoral students who are unable to finish their academic, fail their mid-term examinations, or have any record of academic misconduct will be downgraded or expelled from school.

Statistics show that in 2019, roughly 42,000 people graduated with master's degrees or doctorates in Jiangsu, while 8,266 students had their school year prolonged and 758 were expelled.

Students from Nantong College of Science and Technology help farmers in South China's Yunnan province sell agricultural products via livestreaming. [Photo/jsenews.com]

Anonymous reviewing of theses was another measure taken by Jiangsu to control the quality of education. In 2018, 1,989 papers were sampled and the qualification rate was 97.4 percent, 0.43 percentage points higher than in the previous year.

The province has increased the number of students and the size of schools, and it is now focusing on industry-education integration to add vitality to social and economic development.

"Jiangsu has a solid manufacturing base and high-level talents are urgently needed in rising industries such as new materials, new energy and intelligent manufacturing," said Hong Liu, a senior inspector of the Jiangsu department of education.

"Jiangsu has invested 1 billion yuan a year to develop a list of 178 cutting-edge disciplines, and over 50 percent of them target rising industries," Hong said.

In addition to inviting entrepreneurs, dubbed "industrial professors", from high-tech companies to schools, classrooms are no longer only held in schools with more off-campus internships and joint training programs held at industrial and technological research institutions and leading enterprises such as Huawei.

Currently, there are more than 220,000 postgraduates studying in Jiangsu. The number is expected to reach 250,000 by 2025 and 330,000 by 2035.