Need more money for college?

This was the subject of a hearing held in May 2013 in Nanning. Participants included dozens of university administrators, government officials, students and parents. All those involved in funding were invited to attend, although only a few had funds. After intense discussions, a unanimous consensus was reached:University tuitionIt does need to go up.

Tuition fees have risen year after year after the expansion of universities, and in 2007, the State Council issued a restriction order stipulating that tuition and accommodation fees for all types of schools in the next five years should not exceed the standards of fall 2006. However, since 2013, colleges and universities in various provinces and cities have started to raise prices one after another, a topic that has attracted a lot of attention after this year's college entrance exams, as this year is the peak year for university price hikes. According to incomplete statistics, a number of colleges and universities in nine provinces have already raised tuition fees by different percentages. Parents' concerns are justified; going to college is indeed getting more and more expensive.

At present, China's university tuition fees still follow an ironclad rule: tuition fees in higher education institutions cannot exceed 25% of the annual per capita cost of education and training.Although there is no publicized method of calculation, according to the stance of various universities, even if tuition fees have risen, they have not yet reached the upper limit of the ratio.

For most universities, tuition has only gone up once since the 2007 price limit was enacted. However, because some schools always adjust their fees every year, the national per capita tuition has risen from RMB 4,720 in 2002 to RMB 8,839 in 2020, a whopping increase of 87%. It should be noted that due to the lack of transparency in the data of private schools, the various statistics usually only cover the "public colleges and universities". . All data and discussions in this paper are limited to the category of "public institutions".

The University generates revenue in several primary ways:

Career income, financial allocations, income from affiliated units and alumni donations. Among them, career income includes tuition fees and research income, such as patent authorization and project funding; financial allocations are usually provided by the government; income from affiliated units comes from school-run enterprises, etc.; alumni donations and education funds are also important sources of income. For most schools, financial allocations and business income are the most important sources of income, especially for those institutions with weak research capacity that need to rely on tuition fees to make up for the lack of financial allocations. At the same time, it is not easy to start schools or hospitals affiliated with some large enterprises, while education funds are usually financed by donations from alumni.

Financial allocations are an important support for university operations

Since universities are public welfare institutions, similar to libraries and subway buses, financial allocations are indispensable to maintaining their normal operation. However, there is a great difference in the amount of funding between different levels of schools, which has led to a more obvious "rich-poor gap" within the university. For example, 985 and other high-level universities usually have higher financial allocations than the average institutions, because these universities are directly under the higher level of the parent organization and their own research and teaching strength is stronger. In Hubei province, for example, in 2021, Wuhan University, a 985 university, will have only 59,000 students, but its financial allocation will be 3.3 billion yuan, while Wuhan University of Science and Technology, a 211 university, will have nearly 140,000 students, and its allocation will be only 2.1 billion yuan.

Despite the seemingly diverse sources of income for China's colleges and universities, in reality only a few institutions are able to rely on research results, alumni donations, education funds and university-run enterprises to generate a stable income. Most colleges and universities still need to rely on financial allocations and tuition fees to maintain their operations. Due to the limited amount of financial allocations, in order to maintain their own operations, some colleges and universities may have toincrease in tuition feesThe