大学:小的抑或大的——中美大学办学规模比较研究及其启示

University:Bigger or Smaller:A Comparative Study on the Scale of Universities in US and China and the Significance

大学办学规模不断扩张已成为近年来我国高等教育发展的一个普遍趋势。而高等教育发展资源过于集中和资源配置方式过于单一、追求规模效应和赢者通吃的社会心态、忽视社会和市场需要的计划经济思维惯性等,则是导致这一状况的主要原因。美国高等教育发展的经验证明,尽管小型大学有其弱势,但它们在教学质量和人类培养方面的独特优势。在高等教育大众化的发展过程中,我国高等教育体系要实现多样化和层次化发展,就应当给小型大学让出一定的发展空间,这不仅是高等教育自身发展的需要,也符合社会发展和人才培养的需要。

It has become a general trend in our higher education development that the universities eagerly extend to be bigger and bigger. The unitary and centralized way of developing resources distribution, the social attitudes preferring the size effect and winner-take-all, and the inertial thinking of planned economy that neglect social and market needs, are the princi- pal eauses of this situation. The experience of higher education development in the United States tells us that even small col- leges have their weakness, but they still have many evident merits, In the development of higher education massification, we shouht give more developing space for the small colleges, to build a higher education system which is diversified horizontally and vertically. That is not only the demand by the development of higher education system itself, but also the request of social development and talents preparation.