Measuring systemic diversity of Chinese universities: a clustering-method approach

Institutional differentiation and diversity in higher education have now become an important policy issue. To tackle this issue requires sound methods to measure systemic diversity in higher education, i.e., the number of institutional types, distribution across all types, as well as between-group heterogeneity. The current methods may well measure distribution of institutions across all types or concentration of certain types, yet they are not effective in assessing the degree of within-group homogeneity and between-group heterogeneity. This study proposes to cluster three different (but related) methods to measure diversity in higher education, which are then applied to data of Chinese universities in 1998 (438 in total at dawn of the enrolment expansion) and 2011 (617 altogether when the massification movement started turning to a new page). The results show a high degree of consistency, and all indicate an increase of systemic diversity in Chinese university sector as a consequence of the aggregate expansion since the late 1990s, which in turn have explicit policy implications.