Education Smcheducation
September 11th, 2009
A Financial Times article analyzing how China’s fiscal stimulus package is being invested as well as some of the package’s shortcomings discussed the employment challenge still facing university grads:
The latest 6.1m graduates from Chinese universities have also been struggling to find work. The education ministry says 68 per cent have been employed so far but independent estimates put the number at only around 50 per cent. More than 1.5m of last year’s graduates are also still searching for work.
At a talent fair next to Beijing’s ancient Lama Temple, 24-year-old Peng Chuan, who graduated with a degree in English in July 2008, has lowered his sights and is looking for work as a waiter. “Salaries in the private sector have fallen so much but some of my classmates managed to get jobs in the government by leveraging their family connections,” he says.
The article put me in mind of a conversation I had recently with a recent Suzhou university grad, who was none too impressed with having a degree. “Lots of people have degrees,” the young Suzhounese told me, “it’s not special anymore like it was maybe five or eight years ago. And it doesn’t make it any easier to find a job. If someone has a master’s degree, maybe other people will think that person is a little bit special, but not too much so.
“Even then,” she went on to say, “people who study so much are kind of stupid in life. They just know how to read read read, but not much else.” So what’s the use of a higher education? seemed to be her point.
For her career path, she, like so many young Chinese, looks forward to starting her own business. What kind of business doesn’t seem much to matter, just as long as she makes money at it.
There seems as well the expectations parents put on children that go to university. Another young Chinese told me how her parents did not want her to become a doctor: “They felt it took too long to make money. So I studied law, instead, because you can get a degree and make money faster.”
A Daily Telegraph article from a couple months ago details some of the sacrifices families must make so their children can attend university.
These are difficult times indeed.
September 12th, 2009 at 12:58 am
From what I understand, right after World War 2 the US had the same problem. The GI bill let huge numbers of WW2 veterans attend university, but the US economy at the time was still dominated by industry (ie, not a knowledge economy) so for a long time it was fairly difficult to find a job for them.
The point is as China’s economy continues to evolve, it will become easier for graduates to find work as more doors are opened by development.
September 14th, 2009 at 6:27 am
Outcast;
That’s a brilliant parallel. I was reading recently the Chinese government has ordered its State-owned Enterprises to increase its hiring quotas by the thousands, its army to increase its rolls and to support increased numbers of internships for university grads.
I would argue that the American government’s military-industrial complex (which kept my father employed for decades and still employs my siblings – I am the black sheep
) and even its Space program in the Sixties went a long way toward soaking up a lot of labor that otherwise would have fallen off the rolls. It’s possible that private industry in and of itself can be relied on in any modern society to deliver full employment to its population.