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2 Chinese higher education fails the
test By Robert Hartmann
HONG KONG - Opinion polls in China in the
past year have generally listed the country's
higher education as one of the three major targets
of growing public discontent, with the other two
being health care and housing.
As such,
the current higher-education system is potentially
a major factor of social instability. Therefore,
to implement President Hu Jintao's blueprint for
building a "harmonious society", the Chinese
government must make efforts to deal with
the
crisis facing higher education.
In China,
where learning used to be highly esteemed because
of the Confucian tradition, university graduates
were once regarded as "heaven's favored ones" who
would never worry about employment. But in recent
years, it has become increasingly difficult for
university graduates to find jobs. This year,
quite a number of university graduates have taken
jobs as housemaids, security guards or unpaid
trainees. Even so, half of the more than 4 million
graduates remained jobless months after leaving
school.
In light of this, Ministry of
Education officials in charge of student affairs
have made a public appeal that university
graduates should be prepared to compete with
"ordinary laborers" in the job market, which
raises the question: If a university graduate is
like an "ordinary laborer", what is China's higher
education for?
It is not that higher
education is so popular in China nowadays that
every ordinary laborer holds a degree. On the
contrary, only a small proportion of high-school
graduates are lucky enough to be admitted by
universities. Meanwhile, many surveys have pointed
out the acute shortage of talent in China.
For example, a survey released by the
American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai early
last month said a skills shortage has emerged as
the top challenge for US companies operating in
China. Charles Mo, who heads human resources at
the AmCham Shanghai, said the skills shortage had,
for the first time in five years, overtaken
bureaucracy as the No 1 headache for US companies
in China. "The vast majority of US companies said
their China operations were suffering from
challenges in recruiting capable Chinese managers
and retaining them," Mo said.
An event
last summer sparked further public controversy
over the policy of admitting university students
solely according to their scores in the national
entrance examination. Normally, high-school
graduates with the best scores in the entrance
exam are ensured admittance by such top schools as
Peking University and Tsinghua University.
But this year, universities in Hong Kong
began to open their doors wide to admit students
from mainland China, to lure talent as well as
funds. All Hong Kong schools offered very
attractive scholarships for mainland students with
top scores in the entrance exam. However, during
admission interviews, the University of Hong Kong
rejected 11 such candidates who otherwise could
have been unconditionally admitted by Peking
University or Tsinghua University. The reason:
they knew very little apart from what they had
memorized for the entrance exam.
Critics
have therefore concluded that the whole of China's
higher-education system is problematic, from
students' admission, to their education, to their
graduation. In the final analysis, critics say,
all problems stem from an internal contradiction
within the current higher-education system itself:
part of its operation still strictly follows
government planning while another part now is
market-oriented.
The government still
decides the number of students to be admitted,
imposes a unified entrance exam, and determines
what subjects a university may teach. But the
government no longer guarantees employment of
graduates, who have to compete for jobs in the
market. As with the failure of the planned
economy, the government's plans for education,
more often than not, do not meet the demands of
the job market.
Furthermore, reluctant to
increase its financial contribution to education,
the Chinese government set a policy to
"industrialize" or "commercialize" education in
recent years, encouraging schools to become like
profit-oriented enterprises. So to increase its
income, a school has to either recruit more
students or increase tuition or, more often, both.
Quality of education is neglected.
Because
of this internal contradiction, China's
higher-education system now faces several serious
problems.
The entrance-exam
problem. The strict unified exam has been
severely blamed by many in education circles for
being only good at enrolling bookworms and
creating inequality and injustice.
To be
successful in passing the entrance exam,
youngsters have to bury themselves in book stacks,
completely divorced from
