certain: Money alone can't ensure the successful operation of colleges. In China, almost all important resources find their way to cities. The current trend is also that county colleges not operated by local governments are moving to big cities.

It's not impossible to build up a college operating under the local government in every one of China's 2, 200 counties. However, China is faced with uneven regional development, so apart from several rich counties in the eastern coastal regions, the majority of counties can't ensure good quality of education, particularly in central and western regions. The poor academic performance in some existing locally-run colleges bears this out. To make county colleges cooperate with prestigious universities, such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, is possible, but when there are thousands of branches of the two universities across the country, these world-class brands may soon face ruin.

According to Xin, county colleges can offer more technical courses, but is it proper to call a school that focuses on technical courses a college? If it is to provide such courses, secondary polytechnic schools will prove to be more practical and useful. China already has the highest number of college students in the world, so the current priority is not to increase colleges but to improve the quality of education.

Ou Muhua (Yanzhao Metropolis Daily): World-famous universities like Harvard and Oxford are open to the whole world, so how far can we expect our county colleges to go in a closed environment?

The biggest problem in China's current college education is not a scarcity of colleges, but the lack in sound college operation patterns. For example, during the 1920s and 1930s, there were much less colleges than the present number, but at that time, colleges were acting very well, producing a lot of first-class scholars. The success can be attributed to many reasons and one important factor is the versatile college operation pattern: State-run, privately-run and church universities were seen competing with one another, contributing to a sound development of the whole higher education system. Besides, this pattern could make very good use of social resources. Currently, there are too many restrictions on privately-run colleges.

To push China's education forward, the key is to encourage private investment in this sector, while the government focusing on ensuring teaching quality.

Ji Yanping (www.sina.com.cn): China now has the largest number of college students in the world. At the same time, the number of prospective college students is actually shrinking as a result of the one-child policy. Is it realistic to build new colleges while some existing ones are bound to be eliminated in the short term?

Of the world's top universities, apart from a select few, most are privately run. They enjoy a relatively free teaching and academic research environment and more democratic management, which are the fundamental reasons for sound performance. In China, on the contrary, scholars compete with each other not in teaching and academic ability, but mostly in administrative ranks.

If it is believed that only by opening new colleges can we promote the current higher education quality, we cannot have these colleges run by county governments. They must be run privately.

Zhao Lengnuan (www.skyard.com): It sounds a fashionable idea to set up colleges in all counties, but in my opinion, this is an improper and unrealistic suggestion.

Nowadays, it is because there are too many restrictions from the administrative departments that most colleges seem inactive. Therefore, the priority for the reform of the current college management system is not to decentralize the administrative restrictions, but to strike a clear line between the government's administrative control on colleges and their autonomy. It must be very clear in which fields the government is allowed to interfere and in which it is not. Only in this way, can we expect China's colleges and universities to grow fast and soundly.

If new colleges are to be set up, the process must be very strict, or "fake universities" will spring up everywhere. Xin's proposal has been put forward against an assumption that China has too few colleges. But is this really the case? The current quality of college education and the low employment rate of college graduates show that we already have too many colleges and too many college students.