Student Loans in China: Efficiency, Equity, and Social Justice

In 1989, China started charging tuition on a very small scale at a number of universities as a result of the global trend of cost-recovery policies, thus ending the free higher education era in China. It was not until 1997 that all higher education institutions in China started charging tuition and fees. Both the expansion of higher education and the wide gap between income and tuition and fees have created an increasingly high proportion of students who are academically qualified but canno...