The cultivation of a vast, technically proficient workforce requires a change in mindset and - more difficultly - in traditional culture. Redefining priorities at the get-go stage, such as the national college entrance exam, is a wise decision.

An official of the Ministry of Education recently disclosed that China's all-important college entrance examination is to be seperated into two, giving place to the training of highly skilled workers.

To grasp the full impact of this measure, it is necessary to alert ourselves to the split nature of our job market for college graduates. On the one hand, millions of new graduates face tough competition each year, leaving many without a job offer and struggling on the outskirts of urban centers; on the other hand, many vacancies cannot be filled as employers fail to find suitable candidates.

It does not take a rocket scientist to conclude that tertiary education institutions are not turning out the kind of talent the market needs.

What it needs is an abundant and sustained supply of highly skilled workers, such as operators of sophisticated machinery, those who will fill the needs of the economy well into the new phase of development.

On average, China spews out 17 million young people each year from its schools into the employment pool. About 7 million of them are from institutions of higher learning. But only 1.4 million receive the kind of technical training that "will help them find pretty good jobs", said Lu Xin, the deputy minister, who used a public forum to reveal details of the coming change in the entrance exam.

There are three kinds of "skilled talent", Lu says. The first is engineers, the second highly skilled workers and the third high-quality laborers. Of course, China's colleges do produce engineers, but engineers are not expected to perform tasks traditionally done by workers, at least "workers" in the sense of physical laborers.

China needs an ever-replenished reserve of professional practitioners who possess a certain level of expertise to perform in the information age. They may not be required to innovate as senior engineers do, but they are by no means workers of your grandfather's generation who simply went through preordained routines, because those jobs have increasingly been replaced by automation and computers. It is this middle stratum, the so-called high-skilled workers, that is highly deficient in the current phase of growth.

When you hear of a home caretaker or a certain factory position offering a salary higher than that typically associated with a college professor, you know how high the demand is.

Yet, our schools are not meeting that demand - at least not fast enough.

The biggest stumbling block, as I see it, is traditional ways of thinking. China's education is built on the notion that one is armed with a sufficient cache of knowledge to be eligible for officialdom. This dates back 2,000 years to when Confucius actively sought to provide counsel to various state rulers. The Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) poet Li Bai was not content with being a celebrated man of letters; he wanted to use his literary achievements as a means to break into politics.

This line of thinking is alive and well if you care to glance at any alumni book from the major universities in today's China. Officials and statesmen and stateswomen of high ranking are always listed most prominently.

Ironically, Confucius and Li Bai would have received positions that now correspond to official ranks. The academic world is often said to be an ivory tower, but actually it is more like a parallel world, with an emphasis on the decision maker rather than the implementer. The former is regarded as the brain with knowledge whereas the latter is seen as the footman with hands-on skills. In the Confucian value system, the former tends to rule and the latter tends to be ruled.

In the Chinese language, to be educated is often equated with reading books. Leonardo da Vinci would probably not be held in esteem in ancient China because he spent so much time observing the world and making discoveries instead of reciting classics and showing off that erudition in poetry. (John Milton would be a paragon of great learning.)

When that cultural preference is translated into education, it determines the hierarchy of disciplines. Humanities and social sciences become fertile ground for fostering those who rule and thereby attract applicants with high scores. The recent generation of state leaders with technology backgrounds has helped shift the balance a little toward that of the doer. But it has not completely changed the mindset simply because their education is perceived as a springboard, rather than a necessity, for their success.

If you believe that the disparity is at least good for humanities and social sciences, you're dead wrong. It only implies these disciplines will attract the wrong crowd, those who are not innately interested in such knowledge but want to use them to move up the social ladder. And it also means disciplines with professional goals are often given short shrift.

A friend of mine manages a vocational school, sometimes called a technical school. The students enrolled are junior high graduates, so it is not the equivalent of a college education. They train in skills like automobile maintenance and repair. Many receive job offers long before they leave the campus. The employment rate has been held at 100 percent for many years now. Yet when people talk about the school, they turn up their nose, saying only students who perform poorly academically would pick this school.

It may not be able to recruit the top students, but they seem to be doing fairly well in the job market and, judging from salary data, graduates from such schools are often better paid than those from a regular college. The pet peeve of Chinese employers for a new college graduate is, "His eyes are high, but his hands are low", meaning he can wax eloquently about a problem but has no idea how to solve it.

Of course not all professions are paid properly. By Western standards, Chinese healthcare workers are paid a pittance. The best doctors often supplement their income by moonlighting, rushing to nearby towns to patients who are willing to pay the market fee for their services. This is a clear indication that resources are not distributed in the most scientific way possible, which will serve to smother future crops of talents from emerging. For one thing, a bachelor's degree in medical science takes five years instead of the usual four.

Other than the economic stimulant of payday, respect from society at large is a big factor in channeling more human resources toward the field of professional training. An artist or writer could be struggling at the beginning of a career, but people can usually understand his or her aspirations. Businesspeople used to occupy the lowest rung of China's social ladder, but the emergence of the business school, as a result of influence from the West, has lifted some of them onto a higher plane. Even though newfound wealth has complicated public perception on this segment, it is at least considered a legitimate pursuit for those with talent.

The same thing has to happen for a wide array of professions whose practitioners need highly technical skills to perform their tasks. They may be called engineers, technicians or simply skilled workers, but their importance can only rise as China's economy moves from farm to industry, to an economy of information and high technology. For most people, humanities and social sciences should be part of one's upbringing, not a means to a livelihood. Learning something useful should not be a notion brushed aside by snobs, and enshrining such knowledge in the pantheon of the college exam is a good first step that will ripple through the cultural pond.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 04/12/2014 page11)