China to boost universities via college majors

China will release a plan this year to support 10,000 majors in its higher education institutes to achieve "world-class" status, the Ministry of Education said on Tuesday.

"Around 20 percent of majors in China's universities are expected to become first-class in the world by 2022 to ensure that the country will have competitive talents globally at that time," said Wu Yan, director of the ministry's Department of Higher Education.

Local governments also are encouraged to cultivate 10,000 majors into first-class, which means 40 percent of majors in the country's universities will be competitive in the world by 2022, Wu said at a press conference.

There are a total of 56,000 majors in 92 categories in the country's higher education institutes.

The ministry also released its first national standard on the teaching quality of higher education institutes at the conference, covering all the 56,000 majors.

The standard is student-centered and outcome-based, and focuses on students' continuous quality improvement, Wu said.

The ministry has spent four years and held hundreds of seminars in formulating this standard, which will be first implemented at the country's top universities.

All universities are required to adjust their student cultivating programs according to the standard.

The ministry will supervise the quality of the majors and release their "performance report" in due time, according to Wu.

The standard has included education on core socialist values in all majors to combine professional education with ideological and political education, he said.

"Qualified talents should have both political integrity and professional competence," Wu said.

In September, China published a list of 42 universities it would support to achieve "world-class" status.

Under the "double first-class" project, which refers to "world-class university" and "world-class discipline", the country is seeking to significantly increase the number of highly-ranked universities by 2050.