Abstract:

Enabling to establish for-profit private higher education institutes (HEIs) is a major decision in the field of higher education in China. Based on the modified framework theory of Multiple Streams, this paper runs a comprehensive analysis on the policy of Chinese for-profit private HEIs from the aspects of problem stream, policy stream and political stream. The key result is that, there is a vacillation and integration between the market orientation and the government orientation in the decision-making process for the policy of the development of private HEIs, under the challenges like the market, privatization, etc. The focusing on the core concept of the normative development of non-governmental universities opened the “Policy window”of Chinese for-profit private HEIs. The author recommends that the government should pay close attention to the source of the problems and find the key issues to improve the policy of for-profit private HEIs, in order to improve the governance in the future, and pay attention to the multiple demands of the policy of for-profit non-governmental universities and actively explore good policies of for-profit private HEIs seriously.

Key words: for-profit private higher education institutes, policy process, policy governance, improvement, multiple stream analysis