How geographical neighboring competitors influence the strategic recruiting behavior of universities is still unclear because previous studies assume spatial independence among universities. Using data of Subordinate Universities of the Ministry of Education in China, this study found that the choice of admission score level by one university was spatially autocorrelated with its neighboring competitors and four strategies came into being within spatial enrollment competition. The intenseness of spatial competition decreased as the number of neighboring competitors increased while the difference of admission score increased as the distance between competitive universities increased.

In this paper, a multivariate spatial autoregressive model of local public education expenditure determination with autoregressive disturbance is developed and estimated. The existence of spatial interdependence is tested using Moran’s I statistic and Lagrange multiplier test statistics for both the spatial error and spatial lag models. The full model is estimated by spatial econometric models approach using county-level data from 1,520 Chinese counties. The results indicate the existence of significant spillover effects among local governments with respect to spending in local public education services. The economic level determines local education expenditure level significantly. There are non-linear relationships between education expenditure and predictors such as the proportion of non-agricultural population, the immigrant population from other provinces and children population. It reveals that countries in coastal area and in inland area respond asymmetrically to neighbors’ education expenditures, respectively.

How can one country narrow the regional disparity during the tremendous expansion of higher education? This issue remains unexamined and critical analysis is needed to unveil the spatial dynamics behind expansion of higher education. The spatial analysis shows that there is significant strategic interaction among neighboring provinces in China during the expansion of higher education. It implies that the expansion of higher education intensifies spatial interaction among provinces which facilitates narrowing gap of higher education among provinces in China. The convergence analysis shows that the speed of σ-convergence is 1.3% and the average speed of β-convergence is 2.1%, which give robust evidences to support the increasing spatial equalization of China’s higher education. Meanwhile, local spatial dynamics analysis shows that the catch-up strategy and cluster growth strategies of China are effective to achieve the balanced expansion goal.