The periodic reflection on the expansion of university enrollment is carried out with a questioning tone. Indeed, the high tuition fees of higher education, the way out for college students after graduation, the mental confusion of students at school, the quality problems of China University and corruption all seem to constitute doubts about this issue. However, if we look at the same problem from different backgrounds and perspectives, we may come to completely different opposite conclusions. Especially when all social classes in the transition period have not reached a consensus on development and found common interests to a certain extent, to a large extent, the phenomenon will become a fog, making the prospects confusing, and people will not see the favorable prospects, so that they suspect that this road is wrong. In the mid-1990s or before, there was a charge for going to college, but the average family could afford a small fee. The only threshold for everyone is the "college entrance examination", and everyone is equal before the score. But this does not mean that higher education does not need costs. Only after the state bears most of the costs, universities, like grain and oil products supplied by tickets during the Cultural Revolution, are products that everyone can enjoy, but the supply is very scarce, and even fewer people can enjoy it, depending on whether they can get the "tickets" for the supply. There are many charges now. One year's tuition for a college student is equivalent to half a year's income for a family in a medium-sized town. Many families are bankrupt or heavily in debt because of going to college. But the supply has greatly increased. Whether the charge is reasonable or not depends first on the cost. In the past, college tuition was low, not because there was no cost, but because the cost was basically paid by the state. In the case of decreasing government share and increasing costs, we can only adhere to the principle of "user pays" and let some people bear the costs themselves. We said, this is reasonable. Because the total wealth of society remains unchanged and we are a developing country, we have to obey the efficiency principle of economic development and give up the ideal of "equality of wealth" to a great extent. This is the case with higher education. Higher education is different from basic education, and its cost is not legally paid by the government. In this case, most people who can go to college are those who have the ability to pay or pay voluntarily in debt. There is no third way to go for the time being. Let everyone who enjoys university resources pay for this product. Compared with a single country in the past, higher education has actually received a lot of private investment except the government, and its resources have been greatly increased, which can accommodate more people to go to universities. This is the idea of "robbing the rich to help the poor". Nowadays, many people regard going to college as an investment, expecting a relatively high income after graduation and the investment can be recovered as soon as possible. But the current situation is a bit counterproductive. On the one hand, tuition fees are increasing and doubling year by year; On the other hand, the social benefits of college students are declining, from the original basic monthly salary of 3,000 to 5,000 to about 1000, and the income from education investment is far lower than expected. This trend is hard to accept, but it also reflects that China is ending the era of scarcity of college students on a large scale, and it is not a bad thing that prices will inevitably fall after sufficient supply. At present, college tuition is indeed higher than the reasonable limit. Mr Wang Dingding said that "our university is becoming the most expensive educational institution in the world". The expansion of enrollment and the increase of fees appear at the same time, which seems to be closely related, but there is no direct relationship. The sharp increase in university tuition fees is mainly due to external reasons. First, the government has gradually reduced its investment in higher education. Second, the expansion of university scale has brought about an increase in investment, especially the latter, which will increase the cost of higher education in a short time. In the long run, due to the balance between the market and the price, the price must be reduced. The high cost of universities is partly due to the inefficiency of bureaucracy and the corruption of rent-seeking activities. Therefore, the most important factor still comes from the state monopoly of running schools and management mechanisms. It is precisely because of this that the current enrollment expansion is still not enough, and it should continue, with an enrollment expansion of ten times and a hundred times. When the university was an elite education, it was an "ivory tower" and an ornament of identity and status. At that time, the low fees seemed reasonable, but in fact, the publicity was not strong and the fairness was not wide enough. Now this aspect has expanded, and the principle of university education has changed from "let excellent people go to college" to "anyone who is willing to study can study", which can benefit more ordinary people who have the ability and determination to pay. The expansion of university enrollment makes higher education no longer the favor of the elite, and its publicity is getting bigger and bigger; While increasing publicity, the aspect of fairness is actually expanding. To completely break the monopoly situation, it is necessary to further expand enrollment and degree supply, reduce the gap between supply and demand, and reduce the average profit, thus reducing tuition fees and avoiding the embarrassment caused by universities. As for the phenomenon of dropping out of school because of poverty, we should rely on the improvement of state loans and social assistance mechanisms to make up for the shortcomings caused by the excessive gap between the rich and the poor, and solve the problem that quite a few people lose their study opportunities because they can't afford the fees. Higher education is expensive on the one hand and inefficient on the other. One of the manifestations of low efficiency is that the price of college students as human capital has fallen and it is difficult to find employment. Many college students have studied for three to five years and found that the employment situation is grim. They can only engage in the most basic industries and get the most basic wages, which is far from expectations. They can only complain that studying in recent years is unnecessary, and they might as well come out early to find a job. It is a basic fact that China's labor force population is nearly 800 million, which is very huge, with a low average education and a single structure, and can only engage in relatively low-end production and service-oriented work. For such a large employment force, Mr. Tang Min's judgment that "the unemployment situation in China is more severe than it is now, and our international competitiveness is weaker" is not wrong. Providing university education is equivalent to providing a "flood discharge area" for the society before employment and alleviating the short-term shortage of basic labor. Although it is only three to five years, it is enough time to fine-tune the industry, provide sufficient employment channels and improve the digestion ability of human capital in time. More importantly, through these three to five years, a considerable number of young adults have changed their knowledge structure, improved their employment level, improved their knowledge and creative employment ability, and the overall structure of the labor force has become more reasonable. Getting rid of the current "low-level development trap" plays a decisive role in national economic development and social stability. The overall grim employment situation is determined by the overall situation of China's labor force. The difficulty of college students' employment is also directly related to the unfinished industrial transformation in China. During the twenty or thirty years of China's reform and opening up, a large number of rural laborers were squeezed into handicraft industry, industrial rough machining industry, or engaged in commercial trade. In this case, it is difficult for both college students and non-college students to find jobs in the same field. Comparing more than 30,000 jobs in the United States with more than 3,000 jobs in China, we can see that the employment field in China has not been fully expanded, and industries and jobs such as services, technology and development are far from being developed. On the other hand, China's higher education has been divorced from social reality for a long time, and it is also recognized that the teaching content, teaching mode, teaching materials and infrastructure are not enough to reach the employment level of corresponding posts. In an article a few years ago, Dr. He Weifang said that there are many basic theories and systematic thinking education in universities in China, but professional vocational training "is absent in China today". For example, in law, there is no obvious difference between general legal education and professional education of legal professionals. There is no so-called "judicial training" at all. The more people study law, the less judicial talents there are. There are major defects in the allocation of talent knowledge resources in higher education. Teachers have long been accustomed to "plowing on the blackboard and running in class", and they know little about the employment requirements of enterprises, which makes many college students' knowledge structure, thinking mode and practical ability weak, and even fail to meet the employment requirements of general occupations. This is indeed a problem of higher education itself, but it has little to do with the expansion of enrollment. College students should strive for higher social treatment and status, and also rely on their own ability, technology and knowledge to integrate into the market as soon as possible to create value, and strive for it by hard work; On the other hand, the value of higher education can be clearly and stably reflected only when the personal knowledge structure and social industrial structure are synchronously adjusted and gradually matched. The enrollment expansion has greatly increased the number of college students, and the number of universities has increased by 70% in five or six years, which is more than the total number of universities we opened in the past 100. Therefore, many people think that the scale of universities is expanding too fast, most of them are shoddy, there are no masters, the academic foundation is weak, and the teaching quality is pale and powerless. Can you run a qualified university or an internationally renowned university? I'm skeptical about this. But to solve the problem from one end, the expansion of higher education is something that must be done from now on. Of course, state monopoly is one of the reasons for the present situation of higher education in China, and the overall reason is insufficient supply. We only have more than 1700 universities, which is far from meeting the needs of more than one billion people. The whole society is not satisfied with the status quo, waiting to change this situation, is it because we can't run a world-famous university for a while and do nothing? To run a century-old prestigious school, there is always a starting point, "chicken comes first, or eggs come first". This kind of controversy and argument is not helpful to improve the quality of higher education. It can be said that the best job of a government is to run education, and the best long-term investment of a society is also to run education. A good university is tempered by time. Look at the schools established in the 1920s and 1930s. Those who can persist and survive until now have become famous schools. Today, if our higher education is still underdeveloped, a hundred years later, we still can't come up with a decent university to face the questions of future generations. The expansion of university enrollment is only the first step. In the eighth year of enrollment expansion, it is necessary to review what has not been done enough, what has not been well coordinated, and what supporting measures have not kept up, so as to make more constructive improvements. Fourth, the development of higher education is expected to change ideas. As Mr. Tang Min said, the expansion of university enrollment has brought obvious changes to the education situation in China. According to the latest data, the gross enrollment rate of higher education in China reached 17% in 2003 and 2 1% in 2006. Some big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou have reached or exceeded 50%, and the Ministry of Education has also announced that the average enrollment rate of higher education in China will reach 40% in 2020. According to the international classification method, China is in the stage of rapid transformation from popularization to popularization of higher education, and five years ago, the whole society had not yet stepped out of the elite education paradigm. In other words, it will take us less than 30 years to complete the "leap-forward" transformation of higher education from elite to popular. "University enrollment expansion" is the biggest move in this transformation process, and it is also a key step in the process of education reform in China. The expansion of university enrollment not only improves the quality of labor force generally, but also adapts to this process. Objectively, it is accompanied by the essential differences between the evaluation of higher education and the value judgment standards such as expected value, education view, talent view and employment view. Today's debate about the expansion of university enrollment is precisely because this concept adjustment has not been completed. The confusion caused by this change is too rapid and huge, and it is easier for people to use phenomenon judgment instead of future thinking. Our university used to be Imperial College. It is the dream of all scholars to be an official, get ahead, get ahead, get out of ordinary identity, enter the ruling class and be a "talented person". In the sixties and seventies, college students became national cadres as soon as they graduated, with a salary of twenty-three, and most of them were taken away by institutions and government agencies. The only way for rural children to jump out of the agricultural gate is the college entrance examination. This kind of system design disappeared with the abolition of the "national distribution system" for college students in the 1990s, but the inertia of social thinking still exists after all, and the enthusiasm for seeking background through going to college has not diminished. But after all, the society is developing, and the function and mode of education have changed from the period of small farmers to the period of industrialization. In the past, our higher education was to train elites and bureaucrats. Going to college means gaining a certain identity and status. In the era of "national integration", going to college is more about cultivating citizens with higher quality and better thinking. In other words, the "university spirit" is more reflected in humanistic quality, creativity and critical spirit, and accordingly it will have higher professional competitiveness, but the premise is that occupations are not divided. Therefore, for the phenomenon of "Peking University students selling pork", if instrumental rationality is used instead of value rationality and traditional value judgment continues to be used to talk about it, it is easy to draw retrogressive conclusions such as "the university is uneconomical" and "it is useless to study in the university". Because of this, when we reflect on the policy topic of "whether the expansion of university enrollment is correct" today, we must leave this traditional context and consider it from a broader and longer-term perspective. With the popularization of higher education, more resources will be used for people's own development, and employment and income are not the only standards to measure the quality of university education, let alone infer that "university enrollment expansion is wrong". Compared with the rampant "fake diplomas" in China, in countries and regions where the higher education penetration rate exceeds 80%, such as the United States, European countries, Japanese and even Taiwan Province Province of China, everyone is used to starting their own businesses, and diplomas have basically no utilitarian added value. We can draw the conclusion that even if higher education with a gross enrollment rate of over 50% is popularized, it cannot represent the general modernization of the quality of the labor force, not to mention that the development of higher education in China has reached the development level of modern civilization. Only when the whole society regards higher education as a training place for "spiritual adults" and as the source of new culture, new economy and new ideas, rather than expecting the direct benefits brought by higher education, can universities get rid of this instrumental burden and show their due value and status.