Education aims to cultivate as many people as possible for as little cost as possible. This can only be achieved by combining the theories of market competition and State sponsorship.

So reads the arguments of Vice-Minister of Education Zhang Baoqing, who said earlier this month that education should not be treated as a profit-making industry.

Zhang said many local governments illegally sold public schools to private investors in the name of educational industrialization.

The vice-minister is right to stress that education as a public welfare should be affordable, but at the same time, his speech did not mean public educational institutions should monopolize the field and stop competition in education in its tracks.

Ironically it is the monopolization of education and not rising competition that has raised the cost of tuition and its inconsistent policies.

In a recent, widely reported case, the associate professor in charge of enrolling students from the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region into the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics charged a student's parents 100,000 yuan (US$12,100) to make sure he was enrolled.

This is apparently not the only case of bribery on this kind of scale, according to some media reports. Corruption is widespread and only a few of those behind it get caught.

But while poor regulations within the education authorities themselves have been attacked for helping corruption along, it is also the lack of available places for further education that makes it easy.

In other words, if there were more colleges, there would be fewer chances of corruption through enrolment because there would be other choices for students.

Another cost to students is the growing price of tuition in colleges and now, even in high schools. Charging higher tuition fees certainly seems to help colleges expand the number of places available to students. There are now at least 10 times more places than there were 10 years ago, and the number of China's students has increased from 3.41 million in 1998 to 11.08 million last year, just five years later.

At the same time it is not always easy to determine exactly where all the extra cash is going, other than towards the waves of luxury buildings that seem to have spread in and around college campuses in recent years.

It is difficult to see why in colleges where the spirit of industriousness is taught, there is such a necessity to build so much over such a short period of time.

At another level, China's basic education, particularly in rural areas and to children of migrant workers, is seriously underfinanced.

Increasing the number of colleges through encouraging private colleges could help solve the problem because private education institutions are more cost efficient.

One problem is that State schools provide unfair competition to private schools. State schools are able to run profit-making educational programs, using free facilities, all government funded, to compete with their private rivals.

In the face of this competition, private schools find it tough to make a living and maintain normal operations - paying for staff and all other facilities. Some are forced to increase tuition fees, others lower education standards or use dubious methods to coerce students into enrolling.

While it is right to insist that education should be a public welfare undertaking, it needs fair competition alongside to keep it healthy, particularly in higher education.

Encouraging competition in education means the government education budget should not only be spent on public schools but also on subsidizing some high-quality but cheap private educational institutions.

The State's education budget should be linked to the quality of the school, and individual colleges should be given greater autonomy.

This autonomy does not mean tuition fees are certain to increase. Proposals by public colleges to increase their fees must be approved at public hearings, as long as their budget comes from the public purse.

In a better competitive environment, if given greater autonomy, some universities might even lower their fees to attract better students - an indicator of educational excellence.

State schools should also be made to pay for using facilities provided and paid for by the government in setting up profit-making programs.

With this competitive aid, private schools should still be closely supervised and administered by the education authorities.

The government also has to spend more. The current education budget, which only accounted for 3.41 percent of China's gross domestic product (GDP) - 11.67 trillion yuan (US$1.41 trillion) in 2003 - is not enough, particularly in higher education, for average students, let alone other education demands.

Fuller competition and more cash can eventually make education not only a non-profit public undertaking, but a satisfactory public welfare institution.

(China Daily September 10, 2004)