| Volume 6, Number 2, April 2009 |
Qualitative Enhancement
and Quantitative Growth
Changes and Trends of China’s Higher Education
by 黄福涛 Futao Huang |
Transition from Education to Employment
Observations by Chinese Young Professionals
by Anja Michaela Fladrich |
| THE development of China’s higher education since the latter 1990s presents two striking characteristics: qualitative enhancement and quantitative growth. On the one hand, by implementing “Project 21.1” and Project “98.5” and other national projects, the central government aims to build up a few selected internationally recognized universities that are and will be intensively supported by public funds, and also to enhance the quality of teaching and research activities by merging institutions and undertaking transnational education. On the other hand, the Chinese government is also making great efforts to stimulate massification of higher education, principally through increasing enrolment in the existing public sector, supplemented by encouragement of growth in the non-government sector and institutions in cooperation with foreign partners. Much of the existing research on China’s higher education focuses on certain aspects of the higher education system. Much literature deals with some important issues in China’s higher education, for example, issues concerning private higher education, financial problems...
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IN today’s knowledge-based economy, graduates
in China face fierce employment conditions;
growing domestic and global socioeconomic
pressure has changed the Chinese
labour market into a place of rising unemployment
and workplace competition. At the beginning
of the twenty first century, students returning
from overseas, the overall growing numbers
of students graduating from China’s institutions
of higher education as well as the burgeoning
pool of job seekers all face the new reality of the
Chinese labour market—an increasingly better
educated workforce aggressively competing for
work. In Beijing and Shanghai, graduate supply
had exceeded demand already in 2002 and
local labour markets for graduates, irrespective
of their major or the reputation of the institution
of higher education they graduated from,
are saturated. This development has substantial
repercussions for new graduates entering
the labour market as their previous privilege
and competitive advantage of belonging to a
small, educated elite has vanished (Solinger,
2003; Tai, 2004; Gough, 2005)...
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Catering for the Market
China’s Graduate Employment Problem
by Gerard A. Postiglione 白杰瑞
& 谢爱磊 Xie Ailei |
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SINCE the end of the 1990s, the higher education sector in China has expanded rapidly. This expansion is both the inevitable consequence of the increase in the number of high school graduates and the result of the Chinese government policy in response to the Asian financial crisis of the time.
At the end of the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis swept through all of Asia and brought with it terrible losses for many economic entities. In order to subdue its negative effects, China implemented proactive economic policies and tried to stimulate internal demand through large-scale investment in infrastructure. Encouraging consumption was another important tactic.
The expansion of higher education, then, became an important policy decision to attract more families to invest their savings in education and thereby stimulate economic development. According to statistics from the Chinese Ministry of Education, since 1994 the number of ordinary undergraduate colleges has doubled, and the number of full-time undergraduates has increased by 700 percent (see figure 1)...
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| Issue 6.2 |
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Economy, Employment, Education, Ethics
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