Breaking News: Chinese Students Graduate Lacking Practical Skills
New survey data. Here’s the summary:
Most Chinese college graduates in 2009 were not well prepared for the workplace, lacking in professional skills. They found little room for career development and were also constrained by low pay in their jobs, according to a recent survey.
My guess is that this is an attempt to explain the high rates of unemployment in the recent graduate demographic and perhaps suggest ways of alleviating that problem.
But really. Is this helpful new data? Were graduates from Chinese schools ever ready on Day One to jump into their jobs with useful skills? I’ve never seen it with lawyers, that’s for sure.
Moreover, how is this different from many other countries? Pardon the legalese, but I didn’t know fuck all about practicing law when I graduated with my J.D. My M.A. was laughably inapplicable to any specific job, and I won’t even talk about my B.A. in history.
And yet I still swear by a liberal arts approach to education. I still think I received an excellent education all the way down the line and learned lessons that I apply to my current profession every day. So I wouldn’t really change anything on that end, at least for certain professions.
I do understand, however, that some positions require newbies that have some rudimentary training, and that educational institutions bear some responsibility for unpreparedness of grads. Chinese universities are better than they used to be but still have a long way to go.
At the same time, employers should learn how to train their new hires better as well. In the law biz, I’ve seen firms that are quite good at this and others that have no clue whatsoever, and it’s either sink or swim for new hires.
All of this is somewhat beside the point, though. The main reasons for the huge unemployment rate in this population includes the large population bump in kids this age (a temporary phenomenon), a greater number of universities (i.e. relatively more grads), and an economy still recovering, in some sectors, from the recession.
Better training will help, and schools need to do their share. But doing so will certainly not solve this temporary problem.
Yeah, well, data mining companies need to do this to survive. This is the same problem everywhere. However, I believe majority of a person’s education should not be pinpointed to the institution. The student should take the initiative to better himself or herself.
With regards to a liberal education, what you have forgotten is that a liberal arts education (done right) instills the faculty of critical thinking. However, critical reasoning, at its best, is actually detrimental to a state that requires uninformed obedience to work.
Just look at the jingoist propaganda the state media spews every day. You think those with the ability to rationally critique read it or believe it?
Yet, speaking with many Chinese people they take it all in stride, as if it makes perfect sense that, for example, Google is using censorship as an excuse to leave China.
The politics of it aside, critical thinking doesn’t work well for harmony.
You’re right, those two things are not compatible. That’s why people say that if China really wants innovation and world-class industry, it needs critical thinkers. And if it wants critical thinkers, something will eventually have to give on the political side. What that will actually look like, I have no idea.