China now has 124 vocational undergraduate universities, with another 52 regular higher education institutions offering vocational undergraduate programs, the Ministry of Education said at a news conference on Monday.
Vocational undergraduate education is the undergraduate level of vocational education. It was introduced to break the "ceiling" that limited vocational education to the junior college level.
China has built the world's largest high-quality modern vocational education system, Peng Binbai, director of the ministry's Department of Vocational and Adult Education, said. The country now has 9,151 secondary vocational schools and 1,554 higher vocational colleges.
Vocational education has 1,491 majors, covering all 41 major industrial categories and basically covering all sectors of the national economy, he said.
For industry-education integration, the ministry has worked with 14 provincial regions on pilot reforms to build a modern vocational education system and has established 34 national municipal industry consortia and seven national industry-education integration communities, he said.
During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), national vocational education funding grew 23.3 percent to 757 billion yuan ($113 billion), Peng said.
A multichannel funding pattern with government investment as the main source has taken shape, along with a financial-aid system covering scholarships, grants, loans, tuition waivers, work-study, subsidies, and fee reductions, so that no child is deprived of education due to financial difficulties, Peng said.
The revised Vocational Education Law has established in legal terms that vocational education is as important as regular education, and 27 provincial regions have formulated local regulations on vocational education.
Peng said about 5 million students attend secondary vocational schools each year, while higher vocational education offers education opportunities for nearly 6 million young people annually. Nearly 3 million families have their first-generation college students go through vocational education each year, he said, highlighting education fairness.
The ministry has also implemented a plan to cultivate high-skilled talent clusters, with leading enterprises, high-level institutions, and industry organizations serving as team leaders to advance coordinated reforms in courses, textbooks, teachers, and internships and training. More than 3,000 industry and enterprise standards have been translated into vocational education teaching standards, shifting talent cultivation from traditional knowledge transmission to comprehensive capability improvement, he added.
