MCLC: education revolution

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: education revolution
***********************************************************

NYT is doing a serious on education in China. The second installment
appears below. The first was published last week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-i
n-college-graduates.html

Kirk 

==========================================================

Source: NYT 
(1/24/13):http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/as-graduates-rise-in-c
hina-office-jobs-fail-to-keep-up.html

THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION
Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs
By KEITH BRADSHER

GUANGZHOU, China — This city of 15 million on the Pearl River is the hub
of a manufacturing region where factories make everything from T-shirts
and shoes to auto parts, tablet computers and solar panels. Many factories
are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay
increases and improved benefits.

Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for
most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here
after growing up on a rice farm. Mr. Wang, 25, has worked only several
months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard,
another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office
building security guard.

But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Mr.
Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he
searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little
as a third of factory wages.

“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of
sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.
Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the
same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while
many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national
survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university,
showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree
were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an
elementary school education.

It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.

“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories cannot
find skilled labor, and, on the other hand, the universities produce
students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a deputy
secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.

China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-
in-college-graduates.html>, including a quadrupling of the number of
college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and
scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that
are aiming to become even more competitive globally.

But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable
skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs
with respectable salaries.

Part of the problem seems to be a proliferation of fairly narrow majors —
Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of offices and
trade show booths. At the same time, business and economics majors are
rapidly gaining favor on Chinese campuses at the expense of majors like
engineering, contributing to the glut of graduates with little interest in
soiling their hands on factory floors.

“This also has to do with the banking sector — they offer high-paying
jobs, so their parents want their children to go in this direction,” Ms.
Ye said.

Mr. Wang and other young, educated Chinese without steady jobs pose a
potential long-term challenge to social stability. They spend long hours
surfing the Internet, getting together with friends and complaining about
the shortage of office jobs for which they believe they were trained.
China now has 11 times as many college students as it did at the time of
the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, and an economy that
has been very slow to produce white-collar jobs. The younger generation
has shown less interest in political activism, although that could change
if the growing numbers of graduates cannot find satisfying work.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao acknowledged last March that only 78 percent of
the previous year’s college graduates had found jobs. But even that figure
may overstate employment for the young and educated.

The government includes not just people in long-term jobs but also
freelancers, temporary workers, graduate students and people who have
signed job contracts but not started work yet, as well as many people in
make-work jobs that state-controlled companies across China have been
ordered to create for new graduates.

Yin Weimin, the minister of human resources and social security, said in a
speech last spring that “the major emphasis will be on solving the
employment problem among college graduates.”

Picky College Graduates

Mr. Wang is the youngest of four children. He was born in late 1987, as
the “one child policy” was barely beginning to be enforced in rural areas.
His less-educated siblings have also been leery of taking well-paid
factory jobs. A brother, who got a one-year degree in mobile phone
equipment after high school, opened a luggage shop. Neither of his sisters
attended high school. One is a saleswoman in a clothing store, and the
other is a homemaker and mother who married a factory worker.

An aversion to factory labor is common in China today, said Mary E.
Gallagher, the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the
University of Michigan and a specialist in Chinese labor issues.

“Students themselves have not adjusted to the concept of mass education,
so students are accustomed to seeing themselves as becoming part of an
elite when they enter college,” she said.

China has a millenniums-old Confucian tradition in which educated people
do not engage in manual labor. But its economy still largely produces
blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing, mining and construction represent 47
percent of China’s economic output, twice their share in the United
States, and the service sector is far less developed.

The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with more
marketable majors, like computer science. In 2000, the prevailing wage at
top companies for fresh graduates with computer science degrees was about
$725 a month in Shenzhen, roughly 10 times the wage then of a blue-collar
worker who had not finished high school, said an executive who insisted on
anonymity because of controversy in China over wages.

But today, new computer science graduates are so plentiful that their pay
in Shenzhen has fallen to just $550 a month, less than double the wage of
a blue-collar worker. And that is without adjusting for inflation over the
last decade. Consumer prices have risen 29 percent in Shenzhen, according
to official data that many economists say understates the true increase in
consumer prices.

If Mr. Wang were willing to take a factory job, his interest in indoor
design might take him to Hongyuan Furniture, a manufacturer of home saunas
a 45-minute drive south across Guangzhou from his home.

The factory now offers newcomers 2,500 renminbi a month, about $395,
before overtime. Six-person dorm rooms have been replaced with two-person
apartments. Workers no longer have to hand over part of their wages to the
foreman. Instead, the factory now pays a bonus to foremen of $8 to $16 for
each month that a new blue-collar employee stays on the job. Yet the
factory still struggles to find workers.

The company’s labor costs per worker — wages plus benefits — have been
rising 30 percent or more each year. That is faster than the national pace
of 21 percent for migrant workers, although there have been signs that
pace may have slowed recently with a broader deceleration in the Chinese
economy. And it is considerably faster than the 13 percent annual increase
in minimum wages — roughly three times inflation — that the government has
mandated through 2015.

Wages at Hongyuan Furniture are rising particularly fast because it is in
an area of Guangzhou that was slower to develop. Before wages began
surging five years ago, the company paid $90 to $120 a month to new
workers without experience. Workers then were also expected to pay $13 to
$40 of their monthly pay for the first six months to their foreman in a
sort of informal apprenticeship, said Ni Bingbing, the company’s vice
general manager.

Plenty of college graduates apply for jobs at the company, but they are
not desperate enough to accept blue-collar tasks, Ms. Ni said. The sauna
factory has better ventilation than many Chinese factories, but it is not
air-conditioned. The many power tools kick up a fine mist of sawdust that
coats every surface — not the sort of place where a college graduate can
go to work in a dress shirt and then head straight to a restaurant or
nightclub in the evening.

Subsidized by Parents

One unusual social dynamic created by the one-child policy is that many
college graduates are only children with parents and grandparents who
continue to nurture them into adulthood.

“Their parents, their grandparents give them money; they have six people
to support them,” Ms. Ni said. “They say, Why do I need to work? I can
stay home and get 2,000 renminbi a month, why should I get on a bus every
day to earn 2,500 a month?” That is how Mr. Wang has managed to get by for
most of the last three years without a job. Despite some grumbling, his
parents send him money to help support his modest lifestyle.

He rents a small but tidy studio apartment. It consists of a bedroom with
a pink tile floor roughly 10 feet on a side, holding a low bed and a
bedside table with a laptop on it. A plugged hole in the wall shows that a
previous occupant had an air-conditioner to cope with Guangzhou’s heat,
but Mr. Wang makes do with a fan. An adjacent room, about 10 feet long and
just three feet wide, holds a tiny kitchen, shower and toilet.

The apartment costs $64 a month. Food, Internet cafe visits and the
occasional date cost him $80 a month; fixed-line Internet service costs $8
a month; and electricity and water bills together are another $8 a month,
for a total of $160 a month.

In addition to covering these expenses, Mr. Wang’s parents also paid back
the money he borrowed from friends to pay for his three-year degree, which
cost $1,270 a year in tuition and another $320 a year in living costs.

As was common in rural China until very recently, his mother never went to
school while his father attended elementary school for several years
before dropping out. Now in their 60s, his parents had to give up their
rice farm when the local government redeveloped the land it was on; Mr.
Wang’s father does odd jobs as a construction worker to help support his
son.

Not surprisingly, they have urged Mr. Wang to take one of the many factory
jobs available. “You can get paid 4,000 renminbi [$635] a month for taking
such work, but I wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Wang said. “Your hands are dirty,
you’re all dirty. It’s not for me.”

He has worked brief stints. After a nearly yearlong stretch out of work,
he took a job several months ago as an office building security guard. It
pays just $320 a month — but he already is thinking of quitting after
Chinese New Year celebrations next month, and dedicating himself full time
once again to the search for an office job that would allow him to use his
degree. Entry-level positions in his field pay only $240 a month, but the
work is clean and safe and there is the prospect of promotion. Even better
would be to find a municipal agency willing to hire him, he said.
“The best is a government job; you have job security and a retirement
fund,” Mr. Wang said.

Mr. Wang counts himself fortunate to have a girlfriend. She has tried to
sell Amway cosmetics to her friends, but in her best month only earned
$160, and often earns nothing at all in a month. Her apartment costs 1,200
renminbi, about $190, a month, and she is also subsidized by her parents —
her father is a salesman for construction materials while her mother is a
nanny.

“My girlfriend says, ‘What you’re earning now is definitely not enough for
marriage, you need at least 10,000 renminbi a month, 26,000 would be
good,’ so I’m under extreme stress right now,” Mr. Wang said. “All the
women are like that now — they want the car, they want the apartment, they
want the appliances — of course, I always say yes to my girlfriend.”

Young college graduates like Mr. Wang do not want factory jobs even though
companies increasingly offer blue-collar workers the kinds of benefits
that many white-collar workers could not aspire to until recently.

TAL Group, a large manufacturer of high-end shirts headquartered in Hong
Kong, not only air-conditions its sprawling shirt factory in southeastern
China, something many American factories still do not do, but it has even
opened a library with 50 Internet-connected desktop computers for
employees to use after work.

The combination of the one-child policy and rising rates of college
education is only starting to hit the core of China’s factory work force:
18- to 21-year-olds not in college. Their numbers are on track to plunge
by 29 percent from 2010 to 2020 even if enrollments in higher education
hold steady.

Decline of Technical Training

As hundreds of thousands of factories have opened across the country over
the last decade, they have struggled to find workers who can operate their
complicated equipment, much less fix it. Yet the number of those receiving
vocational training has stagnated to the point that they are now
outnumbered roughly two to one by students pursuing more academic courses
of study.

“We have jobs and positions for which skilled workers cannot be found, and
on the other hand, we have talented people who cannot find jobs; technical
and vocational education and training is the answer,” said Lu Xin, the
vice minister of education, at a conference last June.

China’s vocational secondary schools and training programs are unpopular
because they are seen as dead-ends, with virtually no chance of moving on
to a four-year university. They also suffer from a stigma: they are seen
as schools for people from peasant backgrounds, and are seldom chosen by
more affluent and better-educated students from towns and cities.

Many youths from rural areas who graduate from college, like Mr. Wang, are
also hostile to factory jobs. He is toying with other ideas to earn a
living, but learning vocational skills is not one of them. One idea is to
buy rabbits from wholesalers in the countryside, set out a mat along a
Guangzhou street and sell the animals as pets or food.

When told that this might involve competing with older, uneducated rural
migrants willing to work for almost nothing as sidewalk vendors, he
shrugged and reiterated his hostility to factory labor.

“I’m not afraid of hard work; it’s the lack of status,” he said. “The more
educated people are, the less they want to work in a factory.”