TY - JOUR SN - 2662-9992 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01433-9 JF - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume A1 - Liu, Xu A1 - Zhang, Yanli A1 - Zhao, Xiantong A1 - Hunt, Stephen A1 - Yan, Wuyin A1 - Wang, Yitao VL - 9 N1 - Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article?s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article?s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. IS - 1 ID - discovery10185203 N2 - With the highest number of students in private higher education in the world, China is updating the governance system for this sector. This process involves independent colleges, which were founded by and remain associated with public universities, but which are privately funded. As one of the strategies to improve the development of independent colleges, in 2008 the Ministry of Education asked these colleges to separate from their parent public universities. However, by the end of 2020, over half of the 2008 colleges had still not separated but, over the next year, the outstanding figure suddenly dropped by one-third. This paper analyses the factors affecting the separation from the viewpoints of different stakeholders. Private funders have an interest in making use of the parent universities? resources and controlling and gaining financial returns from the colleges; for the parent universities, the management fees paid by the colleges are an important priority, while, for local government, more and better higher education places with less public finance is a key goal. Currently, there are few studies in the English language literature on independent colleges. By disseminating experiences of higher education reform in China, our findings could have important implications for government policymakers and for senior and practicing managers in universities. PB - SPRINGERNATURE KW - Arts & Humanities KW - Social Sciences KW - Humanities KW - Multidisciplinary KW - Social Sciences KW - Interdisciplinary KW - Arts & Humanities - Other Topics KW - Social Sciences - Other Topics KW - CORPORATE SOCIAL-RESPONSIBILITY TI - The development of independent colleges and their separation from their parent public universities in China EP - 11 AV - public Y1 - 2022/12/03/ ER -