When a Shanghai ad consultant was recently asked to recommend young local designers to an international agency, he sent three candidates with years of work experience. But the company decided they weren’t good enough and had to import designers from the West. It’s a common problem that Chinese vocational grads simply haven’t had good enough teaching. Most of the lecturers don’t have any real work experience, so they can’t teach useful things. When graduates do get hired, they basically have to be re-educated.
China’s rapid economic expansion has exposed many frailties in its education system, especially on the vocational side. The country can’t produce enough skilled workers. In part that’s because it invests far more in academic than vocational programs. Funding has fallen significantly since the 1990s. Partly as a result, today only 38 percent or so of China’s high-school-age students attend vocational schools, well below the official target of 50 percent. To address this deficit, last year Beijing pledged to spend almost $2 billion on 100 new vocational colleges and 1,000 high schools. And this year it started offering annual subsidies to vocational students.
But China’s training is too abstract, what’s urgently required are technicians who can come up with a good idea and turn it into a marketable product. Parts of the country are already adapting; in Shenzhen, local institutes offer" made to order" training for particular businesses. And some vocational colleges have introduced practical research projects.
But vocational education faces a deeper problem: its image. China’s middle class is eager to forget its experience with physical labor, and few allow their children to become technical workers. Everyone thinks these are things that low-class people do. Thus China now produces record numbers of college grads--who struggle to find work because they lack the skills for manufacturing, where demand is greatest. One fix would be to re-brand vocational subjects as" professional," not" manual," skills.
At the other end of the spectrum are China’s 100 million-plus rural migrant workers, many of whom have little schooling. They have never learned how to work with others, to live in the city, save money or choose the right job. Thus they find it hard to learn from their jobs or plan their careers. This results in extremely high labor turnover. Teaching and training" life skills" to complement vocational programs would help.
Yet the urgency of China’s skilled-labor shortfall will force a rethink. For now, China is relying on cheap, low-skilled, labor-intensive production, but it’s not sustainable in the long term, We must raise our skills level, and it’s impossible for state-run colleges to do all the training. Indeed, with the demand for skilled workers growing all the time, China will need all the help it can get.
In the author’s opinion, the best way to solve a more serious problem of Chinese vocational education is （）
A. to train students to turn their ideas into products
B. to change people’s biased impression of its image
C. to set up programs to train rural migrant workers
D. to meditate on the deficits of vocational education
