• comparison
• educational reform
• higher education
• management system

Higher education is a kind of social activity, built on the basis of secondary education, including the training of specialized personnel, scientific research and serving the community. With the advent of the era of knowledge economy, the frequency of knowledge updating is speeded up, science and technology with the rapid development, learning and innovation became the distinct characteristics of this era. Take the point of view at a macro level, any country participated in the international competition will focus on the personnel and human resources as the core of overall national competence, and higher education plays an irreplaceable role in training of various talents, creating hundreds of millions of high-quality workers and innovating the productive forces which perfectly satisfy the needs of the national development.

However, because of various reasons, the developments of higher education in China and in western countries take such different looks, which directly lead to the birth of the paper.
My paper is composed of four parts. The first part intends to give the general introduction about the current situation of higher education of two countries, through which we can see that the different national realty such as the population and national power is the deep-seated reason of the different educational phenomenon; the second part is concerned about the problem of management institution in universities, focus on two groups of relations, which means, the relation between academic power and administrative power from micro level and the relation between university and government from macro level. From the comparison of the two groups of relations, we can conclude that also the cultural and traditional factors impact a lot on the development of the higher education. In the third part, there will be some discussion about the courses of major reforms in the development of higher education in two countries, which apart of all the differences mentioned above, the similar tendency like the popularization , diversification and cooperation of the higher education is emerging in an active way and takes an significant role of the new things. As the last part, some temporary answers have been supposed which try to resolve the curiosity at the front of the paper, which are certainly still waiting for the test of the future changes.