Great News on our relationships with Universities in China!

I am very pleased to let you know that we have just been notified that the Chinese Ministry of Education has given its approval to two new collaborative initiatives between Edinburgh Napier University and Chinese Universities.

As colleagues will be aware, for a number of years, our recruitment of students from China has been on the basis of articulation agreements with Chinese Universities and Colleges whereby students come to study with us for up to three years in order to complete Bachelors and/or Masters degrees. However, we have recently been alerted to a new arrangement whereby, rather than operate a simple articulation arrangement, we enter into a full collaboration with the Chinese University and deliver the programmes jointly. It is still likely to be the case that students would come to Edinburgh to study for the final year, but there will also be a substantial amount of input in the early years in China, delivered by our lecturers.

The arrangement is resource intensive due to the need to visit China to teach but our understanding is that the programmes will be much more popular than simple articulations as the approval by the Ministry of Education makes it much easier for students to obtain employment on graduation, particularly in the public sector. Consequently, numbers are expected to be much higher than those we have been used to. 

The two agreements which have received approval are with Yunnan University of Finance and Economics in Kunming and Guizhou University of Finance and Economics in Guiyang, both in the south west of China, and, in each case, the programme which has been approved is our BA Financial Services. What is particularly pleasing, though, is that we understand that some 400 potential collaborations were considered by the Ministry of Education and only 38 were approved, two of these being our programmes!

Colleagues will be aware that changes to the UK Borders Agency regulations in relation to the granting of student visas have required us to increase our English language requirements for international students and this has had a substantial negative impact on our recruitment for the coming academic year. We are optimistic that these two new programmes will help to compensate for that although there is still much to do before the programmes are finally up and running. At the same time, though, we understand from Yunnan University that they have already recruited 100 students to begin first year with them in September and that bodes well for the future!

Stewart Falconer

Head of School

Accounting, Financial Services and Law