Yisu Zhou is Professor of Public Policy and Sociology and the China Director of the Institute for Global Higher Education at Duke Kunshan University. Before joining DKU, he spent thirteen years as Associate Professor of Education Policy and Sociology at the University of Macau, where he discovered that universities are far more interesting when you help run them.

Zhou spent his youth in Shanghai during the heady days of the 1990s and early 2000s, when Chinese intellectuals debated everything from postmodernism to market economics with the intensity of true believers. His household was no exception. Dinner conversations could swing from institutional reform of state-owned enterprises to Cold War legacies and diplomatic chess moves between the soup and the dumplings, with competing visions of China’s future served alongside the fried rice.

As a high school student and later in college, Zhou watched these passionate exchanges with equal parts fascination and bewilderment. Finding himself temperamentally unsuited to ideological certainty, and perhaps wisely recognizing that picking sides meant losing half the conversation, he fled to the supposed neutrality of mathematics and statistics at East China Normal University. There, data and models seemed to promise a referee’s whistle for life’s messy ideological contests. Then, in a plot twist that surprised even himself, he traded formulas for chalk dust, heading to the countryside to teach English in a rural middle school in Shaanxi. There, watching students navigate the gap between rural realities and urban dreams, his fascination with education’s social architecture took root—a way to study society that was both deeply political and refreshingly empirical and personal. This eventually led him to Michigan State University’s College of Education, though not before the universe tested his resolve with a few character-building detours.

MSU offered Zhou an intellectual playground where disciplinary boundaries were more like suggestions. He wandered freely from psychometrics to policy studies, from economics to sociology, collecting methodological tools along the way. A stint as a consultant for a World Bank project on workforce development added a global perspective to his toolkit, revealing how education systems shape, and are shaped by, labor markets in ways both predictable and surprising. His doctoral dissertation tackled the unglamorous but crucial topic of out-of-field teachers, using OECD data to understand why maths teachers end up teaching poetry (and vice versa).

Landing at the University of Macau in 2012, Zhou found himself in a city experiencing its own educational gold rush. He threw himself into the thick of it, not just as an observer but as a builder. While teaching in UM’s General Education program, where he discovered that interdisciplinary education is both the most rewarding and most challenging form of teaching, he published prolifically on topics ranging from school finance to achievement gaps, from teacher education to social segregation. His work has appeared in journals like Discourse, Sociological Methods & Research, Chinese Sociological Review, and Higher Education, proving that one can be both broadly curious and rigorously scholarly. Chinese media outlets including The Paper (澎湃), Beijing News (新京报), and China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊) have featured his insights, particularly his provocative takes on skills formation and the mythology of meritocracy.

Zhou is an institutionalist by practice and temperament, someone who believes that committees, for all their tedium, are where universities actually get built. At UM, he served on everything from program committees to the University Senate, earning a reputation as someone who could navigate bureaucracy with both patience and purpose. His commitment to Macao’s education community went beyond the campus gates; he became a bridge between local voices and global conversations, compiling stories and amplifying perspectives that might otherwise go unheard.

His recent scholarship has turned to the grand experiment of Chinese higher education’s embrace of science and technology. He studies institutional entrepreneurs who build bridges across academic boundaries, university collaborations that defy conventional wisdom, and the delicate art of cultivating innovation in structured environments. His current book project, Engineering Utility: Making Science Usable in Contemporary China, examines how Chinese research institutes navigate the treacherous waters between academic ideals and market demands.

At DKU, Zhou continues his career-long mission of making sense of education’s beautiful contradictions: how institutions both enable and constrain, how knowledge crosses borders while remaining stubbornly local, and how universities keep reinventing themselves for each new century. He remains convinced that the best academic work happens at the intersections: between disciplines, between cultures, and between the ideal and the possible.

Interests

  • Education Policy
  • Sociology of Education
  • Higher Education
  • Quantitative Social Science

Education

PhD in Education Policy, 2012

Michigan State University

BSc in Statistics, 2005

East China Normal University