First, the expansion of research perspective. The quality of higher education is influenced and restricted by many factors such as government, universities and society. However, in China, the research on the quality assurance of higher education is mostly from the perspective of government regulation and university management, and few social forces are included in the research field of higher education quality management. At present, the systematic and professional research is still blank.

This topic is the first time to make a systematic and special study on the quality and guarantee of higher education from the social perspective, focusing on the social adjustment mechanism of higher education quality and its realization. This is a comprehensive expansion and a brand-new attempt of the research perspective, which opens up a brand-new field of higher education quality assurance research in theory, and is conducive to fully mobilizing all social forces and promoting the healthy development of higher education in practice.

Second, the deepening of the research content. Through research, this topic puts forward three social adjustment mechanisms of higher education quality for the first time: market guidance, public opinion supervision and social evaluation, and makes a special study on the basic composition, characteristics, operation mode and functions of the three mechanisms, which deepens the research content of higher education quality assurance and provides a strong theoretical support for the construction of higher education quality assurance system. These three social adjustment mechanisms, like the political and legal restraint mechanism of the government and the quality management mechanism of colleges and universities, are all important mechanisms to ensure the quality of higher education with China characteristics. Without the active participation of social adjustment mechanism, effective quality assurance of higher education is difficult to achieve.

Third, the innovation of research methods. In addition to the research methods commonly used in educational science, such as literature method, policy analysis method and comparative research method. This topic also adopts multidisciplinary and typical case research methods as needed, which is an innovation in research methods. For example, using the theories and methods of economics, journalism and communication, and evaluation to study the three social adjustment mechanisms, and using the theories and methods of philosophy, system science, sociology, management and other disciplines to study the basic problems, theoretical basis and mechanism realization. In the typical case study, foreign countries take the United States as a typical case, and analyze the basic experience and enlightenment of American society in regulating the quality of higher education from three horizontal dimensions: market guidance, public opinion supervision and social evaluation. Taking China's university rankings as a typical case, this paper studies the development, present situation and future development trend of China's university rankings from the perspective of vertical development.