Shanghai Boosts Education Services

Overseas focus

The school is also part of the city's move in recent years to develop high-level cooperative high school education.

According to a development plan for 2011 to 2015, released last year by the Shanghai Education Commission, the city encourages its quality high schools to establish cooperation with overseas education bodies, schools and groups.

"We want to establish one to two China-overseas cooperative high schools," Yang said, referring to the five-year plan.

"Schools in Britain, Australia and Canada are all in our vision, but we pay more attention to their quality and performance, which may help drive the improvement of Shanghai's education level."

Last year, Shanghai New York University was founded as China's first China-US university as an independent legal entity, operated by New York University and Shanghai's East China Normal University.

Its model of education and international courses has drawn attention from Chinese students and education experts. This year, about 500 Chinese students took part in the first round of admission interviews, with 151 eventually accepted.

The city is also encouraging universities to carry out more high-caliber programs with overseas institutes.

In 2006, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Michigan announced a joint venture to cultivate mechanical engineering expertise. It is one of the first international higher education institutes in China modeled after top US research universities in terms of academic environment, faculty quality, research opportunities and educational program guidelines.

The course systems were based on the University of Michigan system, joint bilingual teaching by Chinese and foreign teachers, mutual recognition of academic credits, and an innovative education system adapted to the global environment and its graduates.

The cooperative program has proved to be a great success and has also been recognized as an innovative model of China-US collaborative education for training world-class talent.

"The cooperation program was a successful example of promoting China's higher education development and talents' training," education official Yang said.

Hua Ouyang is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of Mechanical Engineering and taught in a cooperative program between the university and the US' Purdue University.

"The joint-teaching mode is beneficial; different culture, different thinking modes," he said, adding that combined education methods help both foreign and Chinese students learn more from each other.