New Engineering Education initiative of China: A Policy Debrief

This article discusses and critiques one Chinese national strategy, New Engineering Education (NEE). To maintain globally technical and scientific competitions, increasing demands of qualified engineering talents becomes imperative. Building on previous experiences of engineering education reform, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in China proposes three-stage sequential policy documents to lead the directions and pathway in constructing new and revised engineering disciplines and programs along with exploring potential talent development mechanisms. Intending to train sufficient industry-needed engineering graduates, the systematic reform movement takes initiatives in conducting over 600 research and practice projects from various perspectives and with multiple stakeholders. Although the success of the Chinese NEE initiative sounds promising, two major challenges are identified for policy change. The resource distribution gap among different tiers of institutions needs to be reduced and teaching need to be centralized as one of the cores in NEE reform.