More tech experts, but fewer scholars

In 2014, the number of graduates from various institutions of higher learning will reach a historic new high of 7.27 million, more than the number in 2013 by nearly 200,000. In reality, the market simply cannot provide all of them with government and corporate vacancies, which were traditionally reserved for those with academic degrees.

College-graduated couriers and repairmen are already common in large cities. Some of them, no doubt, would be more likely than their less-educated counterparts to start their own businesses. But they and their parents would hardly count their present situation as the successful start of a career.

It also remains a question as to how many of them can tough out the harsh bottom level of China's urban life - which often means sharing an apartment with many other people and rough and unhealthy daily meals - and eventually catch up with the rising needs of an economy that is supposedly in a transition from simple manufacturing and services to more sophisticated, software-based ones.

More young people should have from early on opted for the kind of education that would help them land in more highly paid jobs and find better opportunities for personal development. But technical education, as a national service that could provide those things, is in a state of inadequate development.

Technical education has continued to run a deficit in its yearly recruitment of students, up to tens of thousands.

Another survey, reported by the official news agency Xinhua, has it that in 2012, technical schools' total recruitment was 2.55 million, smaller than that of the previous year by 29,000.

Figures are not available for 2013 and 2014. But the trend, as one may fear, is likely to continue.

The People's Daily website quoted an entrepreneur from Tianjin, a north China port city, as saying that he knows of a technical school whose enrollment was about 1,000 in 2012, which shrank to 800 in 2013, and is set to shrink even more to 700 in 2014.

At the same time, the design of many technical schools' curriculums do not meet the needs of the changing economy.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily.

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