China Faces a Grad Glut After Boom at Colleges
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Case in point: the new nanotechnology program, which has a dismal employment rate, and most of the employed students are cannibalizing existing chemical engineering jobs.
And it continues this year with the introduction of "management engineering", a concept that is still ill-defined and nebulous, and seems more like a grab at tuition dollars than a genuine academic affair.
Disclaimer: I am in neither of these programs, I'm just sick of this university and its profiteering ways, and how it has been run like a private business as of late. Maybe we should try expanding the campus instead of selling out our government-granted land to build a new office park (oh hey, the article covered that too), or trying to out-buzzword ourselves by building a campus in Dubai. Ugh.
This sort of academic gross mismanagement is global.
It's a lot easier to send bright kids to school, then it is to fix the corruption and mismanagement that's keeping your country underdeveloped.
Canada might just be overenthusiastic ;)
China, like Dubai, is going to learn the hard way that you can't compress centuries of development into years, or even decades.
It's only in the humanities and so-called soft sciences that academia's disappeared up its own backside.
I think it's widely unappreciated (even in China) that China's entire educational system is only thirty years old. During Mao's rule, all the schools were shut down while teachers and intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camps, imprisoned, and killed. When they started up again in 1978, they were effectively starting from nothing.
It's frakkin' hard to bootstrap an educational system, especially for over a billion people. It takes educated people to produce educated people, and there just aren't enough educated teachers to go around. The situation is slowly getting better, but it's certainly not improving fast enough to stamp out millions of high quality graduates.
The problem is compounded by Chinese pedagogy, which has a "Moses down from the mountain" flavor to it. If your teacher gives you bad or incomplete information, then you're stuck with that. Both critical thinking and autodidactic learning are almost entirely unknown.
The Chinese government should be given credit for recognizing the importance of education, but I think this time their reach has really exceeded their grasp. China is going to have to scale back its expectations, and that process will be shockingly painful.
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087181303261033.html?mod=googlenews_wsj