Chinese Education Mired in American-Style Funk

Not long ago, I attended an international seminar in southern China where I listened to opinions from the locals concerning the faults of the Chinese education system. The area was teeming with foreign enterprises and joint ventures from where many processed goods, which are well-received by consumers around the world, make their way out to the world market. The thing is, some of these products require special welding skills, but our Chinese workers’ skills in that department still leave much to be desired. German companies that have embarked on joint ventures in China have advocated importing skilled labor from Germany, but, though these are highly skilled workers par excellence, they lack the required educational degree; thus, this solution would be out of compliance with Chinese foreign labor standards.

This situation exposes two problems. Number one: Our human resource standards are too inflexible. Evaluating employees based solely on a degree is a classic case of book-smarts worship and may very well have a negative influence on the ability of new skilled laborers to enter the workforce. Number two: There are intrinsic flaws in our education system. We have been industrializing for so many years, yet we are blatantly ignoring the most basic fundamental component of industrialization — namely, the development of a skilled workforce.

This brings to mind an article by an American writer that I read several days back, comparing the German and American education systems. The article reported that in Germany, nearly half of all high school graduates go through a three- to five-year worker apprenticeship, which allows them to learn a wide range of technical skills essential for a skilled worker to master. In contrast, only 0.3 percent of Americans have been through this kind of training. This difference between the two education systems has accordingly decided the direction of development in the workforce. The U.S. is now “re-industrializing,” and the Bureau of Labor Statistics believes there are currently some 3.5 million vacancies in skilled worker positions. However, the U.S. is hard-pressed to find suitable workers to fill these vacancies. Many European investors have expressed that the primary reason they have decided against investing in the U.S. is simply the lack of skilled workers in the country.

The great majority of American high school graduates actually do decide to go on to institutions of higher learning. However, some 46 percent drop out before completing the full four years of education. Beyond that, due to the fact that many university graduates are unable to find suitable employment, they ultimately have no choice but to “temporarily lower themselves” by taking on work in a field that is unrelated to their degree. As it stands now in the U.S., 15 percent of taxi drivers have college degrees, while during the 1970s this stood at a mere one percent. Twenty-five percent of salespeople in American stores and supermarkets have college degrees, while the number was only five percent during the 1970s. Five percent of janitors and repairmen have bachelor’s degrees. The ongoing existence of this high-education, low-skill phenomenon is quite frankly a waste of educational resources.

I cannot help but think back on the past few years of development in higher education in China; all manner of places of learning were expanding their enrollment, and the number of undergraduate and postgraduate students was increasing by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, a strange phenomenon reared its ugly head: College graduates began to have serious trouble finding suitable employment. According to reports, just this year the contract rate for university graduates in Beijing has not even reached 30 percent. Contrast that with how difficult it is for university graduates to secure employment in coastal provinces, where enterprises looking to sign skilled workers to high-salary contracts cannot even find suitable employees to hire.

Does this emerging situation imply that Chinese education has become mired in a vicious American-style quagmire? After the adoption of the open-door policy, the American-style model of higher education was a national obsession. In “educational industrialization,” the slogan on every Chinese person’s lips, can we see signs of American-style education and the shadow of the U.S. Department of Education?

We once denied the importance of knowledge-based education; and then, we subsequently kowtowed to the greatness of theoretical knowledge-based education, flocking to universities to earn our college diplomas like moths to a flame. After universities began enrolling students independently, the driving force behind schools’ efforts to increase financial resources became simply the expansion of student enrollment. However, only stressing “the degree” while ignoring the development of ability may well breed a workforce with lofty goals but menial ability — a workforce with unrealistic expectations.

Our economy is in need of a structural readjustment; our enterprises are in need of an upgrade in this new generation of workers. A reliance on talent that is developed through higher education alone will be insufficient to complete this process. At the same international conference that I mentioned at the beginning of this passage, the German contributors stated that in Germany, 70 percent of all technical patents belong to industrial workers, and they have made extraordinary contributions to the improvement of corporate efficiency and worker productivity. The question begs to be asked: Will we be able to learn from this, and what kind of valuable inspiration will it provide?

The author is the deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council at the World Institute of Development Studies.