Chinese students explain why their country's billion dollar education push is failing

Business Insider ^ | 01/30/2015 | STEPHANIE YANG AND MCKENZIE MAXSON

[SeekAndFind]

Two years ago, The New York Times reported that China is pouring $250 billion a year into higher education, with a goal of producing 195 million college graduates by 2020.

Judging by the numbers, China’s efforts are succeeding. Chinese colleges are on the rise, and the number of students that graduated in 2014 reached an all-time high of 7.27 million, up from 6.99 million the previous year.

But Chinese graduates aren’t too happy with the situation.

Traditionally, China’s education system has excelled at teaching rote memorization, assimilation and theory. But the rapidly shifting economy has driven new market demands that can’t be fulfilled by the country’s increasing number of graduates.

William Hurst, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in labor politics in China, said that although many of China’s graduates come into the job market with great skills, they struggle in areas like problem solving, creativity and making arguments.

"It used to be that if you came from a top university in China, you’d get a good job, so many didn’t care how they did in the university," Hurst said. "Over the last 15 years, that system isn’t really there to the same degree, and it's hard to see how students are even finding jobs."

Among college students, 2013 was widely known as the most difficult time in history to find a job. As China’s GDP growth slows to its lowest level in decades, even students from top Chinese universities are pessimistic about their employment prospects upon graduation.

[Pecos]

For college graduates to find jobs in their specialty, there must be enough jobs in their specialty which need to be filled. This obvious fact is often ignored in the U.S. by those who wish to study medieval French poetry or other topics for which there are no financial rewards. My guess is that the Chinese are finding out that their form of government/economy simply doesn’t support a large number of people that had the gumption to complete college.

[wideawake]

This obvious fact is often ignored in the U.S. by those who wish to study medieval French poetry or other topics for which there are no financial rewards.

No one studies medieval French poetry anymore - they haven't since the early 1980s.

It actually requires hard work: learning multiple dialects of a foreign language, textual analysis of manuscripts, historical scholarship to identify references and authorship, etc.

Now the useless academics study Foucault, Derrida, and de Man - but only selections in English translations.

[StormEye]

Don’t worry. They’ll find jobs in the USA under some new Democrat/Republican visa program. Or more US companies will move their manufacturing and R&D to China in order to provide cheaper and better services to Americans. (Isn’t that what the Demo-Republicrat Free Traders are always preaching.)

[ConservingFreedom]

although many of China’s graduates come into the job market with great skills, they struggle in areas like problem solving, creativity and making arguments.

I recently had to hand-hold a Chinese man in our department through some extremely basic data manipulation - apparently he hadn't learned precisely those operations in college. This is a recipe for failure - almost everything I do today I taught myself on the job.

[Pecos]

I never claimed is was easy, just not profitable. Most high school graduates never do the math to figure out if their major will get them a paying job. I love history - so I took history courses as the non-technical electives of my BS in Mechanical Engineering.