The Importance of Ideas: The Co-evolution of China’s Higher Education Scale and Popularization Policies

In China, the popularization of higher education is the expansion of the scale of higher education, but its connotation has different understandings and interpretations at different development stages. Behind the formulation and implementation of higher education popularization policies, there is the evolution of concepts, which goes through the reform of production, processes and results in actions of higher education. This study mainly discusses the concept of the main line under the different educational background, trying to explain how the scale of higher education has changed with the release of a series of higher education popularization policies during the past 20 years; why the Western higher education development stage theory evolves into the orientation of Chinese popularization policy; and what are the inherent logic behind the two-way interaction between higher education scale expansion and popularization policy behind the astonishing speed. The research result shows that the internal logic of the co-evolution of China's higher education scale and popularization policies mainly includes: the social nature of ideas is the development needs of the market economy; the linkage of policies is the continuous expansion of university scale; the decision-making of the government is the reaction of education quality adjustment. Based on this, the study proposes an explanatory model to further explain how the interaction between the government and university determines the overall direction of the education market and system, and how the educational concept urges the two to keep pace.