11 New Universities Across China Planned to Open for Enrolment This Year

11 new universities in China are expected to open for enrolments this year, and many more others are planned to establish during the next years, Erudera.com reports.

The opening of these universities is expected to take place as part of China’s plan to transform the Southern Guangdong province into a technology hub under the Greater Bay Area plan for Hong Kong, Macau, and nine other cities in Guangdong with a diverse population of 72 million people.

Some of these institutions are new, while others are branch campuses of the existing universities or new campuses which have been expanded and are now offering degrees.

However, due to this rapid expansion, the experts have questioned universities’ capacities to attract faculty holding doctoral degrees in order to ensure the sought quality education.

The city government said that it is planning to invest CNY150 billion (US$23 billion) to build 20 new universities and colleges in 2025 in Shenzhen as well as to increase the number of full-time students in the city, from 103,800 to 250,000

“Shenzhen authorities have defined a new area, a district called Guangming, where they want to develop four new universities. It will take some time as they are developing these universities in phases,” the Vice-President of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, Joshua Ka-Ho Mok, said.

The first universities to complete the construction phase this year and begin student enrollments are the Shenzhen Normal University and Shenzhen Conservatory of Music.

Shenzhen University of Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the Guangming Science City may complete the construction phase in 2023. Other planned institutions in Shenzhen include:

• Institute of Creative Design
• Shenzhen Ocean University

The new Sun Yat-sen University of Science and Technology, which will focus on graduate education, is expected to open in Zhongshan, which is one of the Greater Bay Area’s cities.

According to data issued this month by the Ministry of Education in Beijing, China’s higher education sector’s gross enrolment ratio or GER of has reached 54.4 percent during 2020, yet in Guangdong province, the GER stands at around 46 percent meaning it is falling behind the national average.

“The Greater Bay Area aims to become one of the major innovations and science [hubs] not only in China but in the world and, in order to do that, the calibre of talent and the higher education system is central to that goal” the emeritus professor of higher education at the University of Hong Kong told University World News.

Greater Bay Area cities include Hong Kong and Macau, while in Guangdong province, there are Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Huizhou, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Foshan, Zhaoqing, and Dongguan, where the tech giant Huawei’s new campus is built.