Thousands of people joined the Shanhai's first online postgraduate admission information session on Saturday after four local universities scrapped free postgraduate education this year.

However, the universities will give scholarships and grants to cover most tuition and living costs - one of the hot topics during Saturday's information session.

From this year, graduate students at the universities of Fudan, Jiaotong, Tongji and East China Normal will pay tuition fees of about 10,000 yuan (US$1,321) per year.

In most Chinese universities, however, postgraduate students have been exempted from tuition fees since the late 1970s.

But the reforms don't necessarily mean higher costs for most students, as they can benefit from wider and larger subsidies, university officials said. For instance, Tongji announced last Friday that all its PhD students and half its master's degree students will be given scholarships to cover all their tuition.

That means full scholarship winners don't need to bring any cash for registration, as the university will complete the account transfer for students. Other students will have to bring cash to cover the balance between their tuition and scholarship.

Scholarship winners will be evaluated according to their academic performance each year. Those who fail to accomplish their due research tasks, as well as people who cheat or plagiarize, will be disqualified.

At Jiaotong and ECNU, scholarship coverage will also reach about 70 percent of postgraduate students.

"The new policy is good for graduate students to concentrate on their academic and research work, and meanwhile it will enhance the instructors' role in postgraduate training," Tongji officials said in a written statement.

The new tuition policy has worried students, however. Applicants for postgraduate studies at the four universities dropped by between eight percent and 13 percent after the tuition reforms were announced.

Xiong Bingqi, a higher education researcher at Jiaotong, said that it should be the trend for students and instructors to shoulder the cost of postgraduate education at all Chinese universities.

(Shanghai Daily September 24, 2007)