China's higher education must meet the needs of the future, not the past

People in China often lament that far fewer Chinese professionals, compared with their Indian counterparts, are likely to end up becoming leading executives in multinational corporations.

But there may be a cultural explanation for the phenomenon. The Chinese may, as it were, still carry the shadow from their tradition of small family farms.

According to a recent survey about human resources in Silicon Valley, California, and nearby areas, China's contribution is larger than that of New York state and many countries.

China is a main supplier of technical talent to developed industries, after all. Bespectacled Chinese programmers seem to have built an established brand name for themselves.

The need for technical talent will rise greatly in the next few years, with the world on the threshold of a new round of industrialization.

In contrast, the country's technical and vocational education has been the subject of heated debate and even harsh criticism.

According to a report on the the People's Daily website people.com.cn, for the past eight years, the success rate in job hunting for polytechnic graduates in Beijing has been 78.1 percent, higher than that of university graduates, whose success rate is 75.5 percent even though they would have achieved much higher scores in college entrance examinations.

The latter group included graduates from the city's top institutions of higher learning, such as Peking University and Tsinghua University.

The situation also reflects a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon - the society's otherwise unexplainable bias for government or office jobs and for supposedly higher cultural pursuits.

This year, the number of graduates from various institutions of higher learning will reach a historic new high of 7.27 million, about 200,000 more than that of last year.

In reality, the market simply cannot provide all of them with government and corporate vacancies, which were traditionally reserved for those with academic degrees. College-graduate couriers and repairmen are already common in large cities.

Some of them, no doubt, would be more likely than their less-educated counterparts to start their own businesses. But they and their parents would hardly count their present situation as the successful start of a career.

It also remains a question as to how many of them can tough out the harsh bottom level of China's urban life - which often means sharing an apartment with many other people and rough and unhealthy daily meals - and eventually catch up with the rising needs of an economy that is supposedly in transition from simple manufacturing and services to more sophisticated, software-based ones.

More young people should have from early on opted for the kind of education that would help them land in more highly paid jobs and find better opportunities for personal development. But technical education, as a national service that could provide those things, is inadequately developed.

Technical education has continued to run a deficit in its yearly recruitment of students, up to tens of thousands. Another survey, reported by the official news agency Xinhua, has it that in 2012, technical schools' total recruitment was 2.55 million, 29,000 fewer than in the previous year.

Later figures are not available, but the trend, as one may fear, is likely to continue.

The People's Daily website quoted an entrepreneur from the city of Tianjin, in North China, as saying that he knows of a technical school which had an intake of about 1,000 students in 2012, 800 students in 2013, and is set to shrink even more to 700 in 2014.

At the same time, the design of many technical schools' curriculums does not meet the needs of the changing economy, according to Gao Meiqin, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee. The programs are often too simple, too basic and contain too much repetition, wasting too much of the students' time. Many schools with no access to students with the best potential offer too few new skills to meet the world economy's diverse needs.

So, what is to be done? A Ministry of Education official reportedly said that up to half of China's 1,200 or so universities and colleges should be reoriented toward technical education. That is ambitious, and it is highly doubtful that the government can undertake such a major reform effort by itself. It might take forever.

In the meantime, diverse initiatives can be taken on the local level, through competition among privately owned technical schools, with support from their financial partners.

In one sign of progress, local officials are taking the initiative in Xi'an, an interior city running a development zone featuring a mix of international and local technology companies. They are reported to be designing a "college entrance examination of skills" in parallel with the traditional academic one.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact the writer at edzhang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 06/13/2014 page15)