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.

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: china unemployment, college graduates, education, graduates, training, unemployment

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they seen Karl Hungus.

–The Dude, The Big Lebowski

The New York Times just published a discussion on unemployment among recent college grads, asking a variety of experts what their take on the subject was and what some of the causes might be.

The basic supply-and-demand problem:

In 1999, the government began a push to expand college education — once considered a golden ticket — to produce more professionals to meet the demands of globalization. This year, more than 6.3 million graduates will enter the job market, up from one million in 1999. But the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.

Or maybe it’s a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You push education to develop the economy, but the jobs lag certain other measurements of growth.

First up in the debate was Cindy Fan from UCLA, who downplays the huge numbers of grads (still only 8% of population is college educated) and looks for other explanations:

• Geography. Lots of kids from small cities are flocking to Beijing and Shanghai, putting pressure on those job markets. At the same time, there is a “brain drain” in these small towns.

Kind of reminds me of my situation when I graduated from law school. The economy was bad, sure, but the biggest problem for my fellow graduates and I was that we wanted to stay in Boston, a medium-sized city with too many law schools and not enough jobs.

• Sea turtles (?? – hai gui). Chinese students with overseas degrees are returning in record numbers and displacing local grads.

Yes, those folks certainly have a leg up on the local competition. Unfortunately, the market is so bad that many of them have come back to low-paying jobs, if any, earning them the sobriquet kelp (?? – hai dai).

• Training mismatch. Students these days are more likely to be trained for service sector jobs, but China’s economy is still dominated by industrial firms.

Next up is Huang Yasheng from MIT, who focuses on geography as well. Grads do not want to invest time and money in a college education and then go back to their hometown. (The Karl Hungus problem, see above.)

Professor Huang also sees a skills mismatch, stating what everyone knows about recent grads here: they can’t do much. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had over the years who would kill for an experienced Chinese manager who had problem solving skills and who could think creatively. You can’t get that in a college grad (or many older workers, for that matter). I thought this comment by Huang was a particularly nice summary:

Although Chinese universities are not without pockets of excellence, they are churning out people with high expectations and low skills.

Daniel Bell, who teaches at Qinghua, was next. No surprise, he starts off with a quote from Confucius! Bell focuses on the current situation as opposed to the causes, which I think he mostly attributes to a supply-and-demand problem from a boost in education spending.

Bell’s advice is for parents and kids to lower expectations and for China to develop a strong vocational training system. I’ve heard that before, and it certainly is needed. However, if Professor Fan’s 8% figure is correct, it seems like on the whole, China does not have a long-term problem in training this many students.

Next up was Albert Park from Oxford, who is optimistic. He says that given the small percentage of people getting college degrees in China and the trajectory of the economy, everything should work out eventually. Given the short-term pain, however, it sounds as though Professor Park is cautioning grads to modify their expectations.

Last, but not least, was Loren Brandt from the University of Toronto. Professor Brandt points to a mismatch of supply and demand and of skills but is optimistic that economic growth will take care of this problem in the long run, provided that teaching and economic development proceeds forward.

To summarize: too many grads, not enough jobs. Teaching needs to be better, economy needs to grow. Sounds like no short-term solutions and no magic bullet. That does not bode well for recent grads, as the advice given seems limited to “be patient and lower your expectations.”

On the other hand, that’s pretty good advice.

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: china education, china unemployment, college graduates, economic development