The Ministry of Education has released this year's guidelines for managing continuing education programs and off-campus teaching sites, emphasizing the need to align talent cultivation with national strategies and market demands.

"Higher education institutions should make continuing education an integral part of their talent cultivation and social service system," the guidelines state. "Institutions should fully consider their educational positioning and academic strength, as well as market demands and the employment competitiveness of disciplines. They should also thoroughly justify the need for new programs before opening them and continuously optimize the structures of such programs."

Continuing education is a parallel track to China's regular higher education system, which consists of full-time, campus-based study for recent high school graduates who have passed the national college entrance exam, or gaokao. Continuing education, by contrast, offers full-time or part-time programs designed for adults seeking to upgrade their skills or qualifications. It includes online education, adult education, the higher education self-study test and open education.

To improve the structure of continuing education programs, the guidelines encourage higher education institutions with the necessary conditions to establish new programs in fields such as advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, life sciences, energy, green low-carbon development, international organizations and financial technology. Institutions are also urged to offer programs in areas concerning people's livelihoods, such as domestic services.

The guidelines support the creation of programs in fields of urgent need, including opera, cultural relic protection and restoration, non-common languages, foreign-related legal systems and international communication.

The new measures are part of China's broader efforts to reform its continuing education sector.

In 2022, the Education Ministry issued a plan to promote continuing education reform, aiming to address issues such as unclear positioning, underdeveloped standards, unsound systems and low-quality talent cultivation, while advancing high-quality educational development.

Data from the Education Ministry shows that 1,725 higher education institutions offered continuing education programs, enrolling a total of 12.093 million students in 2021 — about 25 percent of the country's total higher education enrollment.

However, as regular higher education expands, the scale of continuing education is shrinking, wrote Yue Chuanyong, former vice-president of Ningbo University in Zhejiang province, and Xu Rihua, a lecturer at the university's Institute of Adult Education.

"As such, the focus of continuing education needs to transition from scale expansion to quality improvement," they wrote in an article published on the ministry's website.

Starting this fall, the Ministry of Education will standardize terminology for continuing education, eliminating terms such as "correspondence education" and "part-time education" in favor of the uniform term "non-full-time education".

Continuing education programs at regular universities will uniformly admit students through the adult college entrance examination, meet basic professional teaching requirements, standardize the minimum duration of study and unify graduation certificates, according to the new guidelines.