MCLC: education revolution (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: education revolution (1)
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I've been asked, by someone in China who cannot access the NYTimes
website, to post the first part of the series Education Revolution. Here
it is. 

Kirk

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Source: NYT (1/16/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-i
n-college-graduates.html

THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION
Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates
By KEITH BRADSHER 

SANYA, China — Zhang Xiaoping’s mother dropped out of school after sixth
grade. Her father, one of 10 children, never attended.

The Education RevolutionArticles in this series are examining the promises
and challenges that China faces as it tries to educate its citizens more
broadly.

But Ms. Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage
of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has
never seen before.

A pony-tailed junior at a new university here in southern China, Ms. Zhang
has a major in English. But her unofficial minor is American pop culture,
which she absorbs by watching episodes of television shows like “The
Vampire Diaries” and “America’s Next Top Model” on the Internet.

It is all part of her highly specific ambition: to work some day for a
Chinese automaker and provide the cultural insights and English fluency
the company needs to supply the next generation of fuel-efficient taxis
that New York City plans to choose in 2021. “It is my dream,” she said,
“and I will devote myself wholeheartedly to it.”

Even if her dream is only dorm-room reverie, China has tens of millions of
Ms. Zhangs — bright young people whose aspirations and sheer numbers could
become potent economic competition for the West in decades to come.

China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call
human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar
middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to
help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is
using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they
move from farms to cities.

The aim is to change the current system, in which a tiny, highly educated
elite oversees vast armies of semi-trained factory workers and rural
laborers. China wants to move up the development curve by fostering a much
more broadly educated public, one that more closely resembles the
multifaceted labor forces of the United States and Europe.

It is too early to know how well the effort will pay off.

While potentially enhancing China’s future as a global industrial power,
an increasingly educated population poses daunting challenges for its
leaders. With the Chinese economy downshifting in the past year to a
slower growth rate, the country faces a glut of college graduates with
high expectations and limited opportunities.

Much depends on whether China’s authoritarian political system can create
an educational system that encourages the world-class creativity and
innovation that modern economies require, and that can help generate
enough quality jobs.

China also faces formidable difficulties in dealing with widespread
corruption, a sclerotic political system, severe environmental damage,
inefficient state-owned monopolies and other problems. But if these issues
can be surmounted, a better educated labor force could help China become
an ever more formidable rival to the West.

“It will move China forward in its economy, in scientific innovation and
politically, but the new rising middle class will also put a lot of
pressure on the government to change,” said Wang Huiyao, the director
general of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based
research group.

To the extent that China succeeds, its educational leap forward could have
profound implications in a globalized economy in which a growing share of
goods and services is traded across international borders. Increasingly,
college graduates all over the world compete for similar work, and the
boom in higher education in China is starting to put pressure on
employment opportunities for college graduates elsewhere — including in
the United States.

China’s current five-year plan, through 2015, focuses on seven national
development priorities, many of them new industries that are in fashion
among young college graduates in the West. They are alternative energy,
energy efficiency, environmental protection, biotechnology, advanced
information technologies, high-end equipment manufacturing and so-called
new energy vehicles, like hybrid and all-electric cars.

China’s goal is to invest up to 10 trillion renminbi, or $1.6 trillion, to
expand those industries to represent 8 percent of economic output by 2015,
up from 3 percent in 2010.

At the same time, many big universities are focusing on existing
technologies in industries where China poses a growing challenge to the
West.

Beijing Geely University, a private institution founded in 2000 by Li
Shufu, the chairman of the automaker Geely, already has 20,000 students
studying a range of subjects, but with an emphasis on engineering and
science, particularly auto engineering.

The Education RevolutionArticles in this series are examining the promises
and challenges that China faces as it tries to educate its citizens more
broadly.

Mr. Li also endowed and built Sanya University, a liberal arts institution
with 20,000 students where Ms. Zhang is a student, and opened a
5,000-student vocational community college in his hometown, Taizhou, to
train skilled blue-collar workers.

China’s growing supply of university graduates is a talent pool that
global corporations are eager to tap.

“If they went to China for brawn, now they are going to China for brains,”
said Denis F. Simon, one of the best-known management consultants
specializing in Chinese business.

Multinationals including I.B.M., General Electric, Intel and General
Motors have each hired thousands of graduates from Chinese universities.
“We’re starting to see leaders com

Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than
1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China
doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.

As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from
high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919.
Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the
United States in the mid-1950s.

China is on track to match within seven years the United States’ current
high school graduation rate for 18-year-olds of 75 percent — although a
higher proportion of Americans than Chinese later go back and finish high
school.

By quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, China
now produces eight million graduates a year from universities and
community colleges. That is already far ahead of the United States in
number — but not as a percentage. With only about one-fourth the number of
China’s citizens, the United States each year produces three million
college and junior college graduates.

By the end of the decade, China expects to have nearly 195 million
community college and university graduates — compared with no more than
120 million in the United States then.

Volume is not the same as quality, of course. And some experts in China
contend that the growth of classroom slots in higher education has
outstripped the supply of qualified professors and instructors.

Xu Qingshan, the director of the Institute for Higher Education Research
at Wuhan University, said that many university administrators seek the
fastest possible growth in enrollments to maximize the size and revenue of
their institutions, even though this may overstretch a limited number of
talented professors.

China’s president, Hu Jintao, in a speech in 2011 acknowledged shortfalls
in the country’s higher education system. “While people receive a good
education,” he said, “there are significant gaps compared with the
advanced international level.”

Giles Chance, a longtime consultant in China who is now a visiting
professor at Peking University, said that many of the tens of millions of
new Chinese college graduates might find jobs at manufacturers but did not
have the skills to compete in big swaths of the American economy —
particularly in services like health care, sales or consumer banking.

“A Chinese graduate from a second-tier university is not the equal of an
American in language skills and cultural familiarity,” he said.

The overarching question for China’s colleges is whether they can
cultivate innovation on a wide scale — vying with America’s best and
brightest in multimedia hardware and software applications, or
outdesigning and outengineering Germans in making muscular cars and
automated factory equipment.
Indeed, Japan’s experience shows that having more graduates does not
guarantee entrepreneurial creativity.

In the decades after World War II, Japan mounted an educational effort
similar to the one in China now. Japan’s version led to a huge middle
class and helped turn that nation into one of the world’s largest
economies. But partly because of a culture where fitting in is often more
prized than standing out, Japan hit an economic plateau.

The Education RevolutionArticles in this series are examining the promises
and challenges that China faces as it tries to educate its citizens more
broadly.

If China’s universities cannot help solve the innovation riddle, the
country may also have a hard time moving forward once its advantages of
low-cost labor and cheap capital disappear, which economists say could
happen within 10 to 15 years, and possibly much sooner.

Still, with 10 times Japan’s population, China has the capability to
compete with white-collar Americans and Europeans in a wide range of
industries.

So Far, So Fast

To see how far China has come, so fast, look no farther than Ms. Zhang’s
own family. For her parents, education was barely an option.

Her father, the eighth of 10 children, was born to rice farmers in 1968 in
a small village near Nanchang in one of China’s poorest provinces,
Jiangxi, halfway between Shanghai and Hong Kong. The family survived on
one meager meal a day. Most of the children, including Ms. Zhang’s father,
did not attend school. At age 12, he followed his brother to a
construction job in neighboring Fujian Province.

Ms. Zhang’s mother was born two years after her father and was the
daughter of the local Communist Party official who ran the village until
1990. She belatedly started school at age 7, in 1977, a year after the end
of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s longest anti-intellectual purge. She
dropped out after primary school, six years later, following a pattern
then common in rural areas.

Ms. Zhang’s father moved back to the village and married Ms. Zhang’s
mother over her parents’ initial objections. He started a construction
business with his brothers. The enterprise has done moderately well,
enabling Ms. Zhang’s father to buy, six years ago, the family’s first car,
a black Ford Focus that was already nine years old.

Rather than pursuing material comforts, the Zhangs, like hundreds of
millions of families across China, have focused their money and effort on
getting their children through high school and into universities.

One of Ms. Zhang’s two younger brothers — China’s one-child policy is less
rigorously enforced in rural areas — is a sophomore studying international
trade at Tongji University, a 105-year-old institution in Shanghai
considered among the top two dozen or so in China. The other brother is
now a freshman at highly regarded Nanchang University, having skipped a
grade in middle school and another in high school.

When Ms. Zhang did not get into a top Chinese university despite attending
a magnet high school, she recalled, “my parents were very disappointed.”
Nor did she initially win a government scholarship. Her parents had to pay
the full annual tuition of $2,000 at Sanya University, which as a private
institution does not receive subsidies as generous as those given to
public universities. Room and board are an additional $1,800 a year.

At top public institutions, annual tuition is a little less than $1,000 —
equal to about two months’ wages for a skilled factory worker.

But as a reward for top grades, Ms. Zhang has won government scholarships
for her sophomore and junior years at Sanya that cover three-quarters of
the tuition.

Even as students like Ms. Zhang flock to Chinese universities, rising
numbers of China’s students attend foreign universities. Chinese
undergraduate or graduate students at American universities reached a
record high of 194,000 in the last academic year, according to the
Institute of International Education in New York. That was almost triple
the 67,000 five years earlier.

In part, this reflects the prestige of studying abroad, and that more
Chinese families can afford the cost and are looking for ways to get their
money and their children out of the country as a way to hedge their risk
against internal political or economic turbulence. But it is also because
a Western college education is better, and Western universities do not
require the same high marks as Chinese ones do on China’s famously
difficult college entrance exams.

Chinese undergraduates who study in the West tend to be from wealthy
families and show a wide range of academic ability, from mediocre to
outstanding. But Chinese graduate students studying abroad typically have
bachelor’s degrees from top-tier universities either at home or in the
West, and they almost always excel academically while overseas, said Doug
Guthrie, a professor of Chinese business strategies who is the dean of
George Washington University’s School of Business.


Graduate students from China often have government scholarships to study
abroad. The scholarships are a tacit acknowledgment by Beijing that a
superior graduate education, particularly in fields like engineering and
science, often is still to be found in the West.

Quantity, but Quality?

Walk around some of the hundreds of newly built Chinese universities these
days and at first glance they look a lot like big state universities in
America.

Just as China has built national grids of high-speed rail lines and
superhighways in the past decade, it has built campuses full of modern
classroom buildings, dormitories, libraries and administration buildings.

Peek inside the classrooms and virtually every seat is filled.

One of the biggest questions about the quality of Chinese universities
involves who is teaching, and what and how. Chinese administrators
struggle to find seasoned professors. Because few Chinese went to college
until the last decade, much less to graduate school, most universities
find themselves in hiring competitions — with one another and with
companies all over China that are struggling to find middle managers and
executives.

“The biggest problem is finding good professors, especially good
professors of around 40 years old with good experience — they are the most
sought-after teachers in China,” said Nathan Jiang, the vice president of
Geely University.

All but the best universities must find teachers among recent graduates,
who may lack experience, or retirees, whose knowledge may be out of date.
China was producing fewer than 10,000 doctoral degrees a year until 1999,
according to education ministry data. So for every person in China who
received a doctorate during the 1990s and might now be in the prime of a
teaching career, there are 3,000 undergraduates.

Especially in fields like engineering, the most popular undergraduate
major by far in China, corporations can easily outbid universities. The
basic pay of a professor is typically under $300 a month — less than an
assembly line worker makes.

Professors can earn considerably more by winning promotion to university
administration positions, but these posts are often based on activism
within the Communist Party instead of research excellence. Those who stay
as professors frequently line up multiple grants to conduct several
research projects simultaneously, which almost inevitably places quantity
of research ahead of quality.

Or, dissatisfied with their pay, many senior professors start companies on
the side, said Weng Cuifen, a National University of Singapore researcher
who studies Chinese university education. “They spend their time on second
jobs, making money.”

Teaching methods in China also tend to be outdated by Western standards,
and seem ill suited to producing either the entrepreneurs or the socially
adept managers that multinationals covet.

A few newer colleges and universities have begun experimenting with
seminars and workshops. But the prevailing pattern remains for professors
to lecture in large halls, with students expected to be quiet and listen.

“Some younger teachers like to communicate with the students, but older
teachers just stand in front of the students and speak alone,” said Long
Luting, a 2010 chemical engineering graduate of Tianjin University, one of
China’s best schools. She just finished a two-year trainee program and has
moved into management at the Beijing offices of BASF, a German chemicals
multinational.

As in Japan, students in China tend to do their most strenuous studying in
high school. In college, they can slow down, whether to pursue more
diverse interests — or, like many students around the world, to spend a
lot of time at parties.

Growing up as the only child of a municipal civil servant in Zigong, a
medium-size city in western Sichuan Province, Ms. Long said that she
studied practically every waking hour in high school and had little chance
to socialize.

“In high school, it’s a tragedy,” she said, recalling her father’s
exhortations to succeed. “Most of my classmates were also only children;
we have a lot of pressure from our parents.”

But when she reached Tianjin University, Ms. Long said, she could take her
classes and do all her homework during the mornings. She spent her
afternoons at an English language club, honing her considerable ability to
banter in the language despite never having traveled overseas.
Some Chinese universities offer as many as 1,000 clubs. They cover
everything from languages to karaoke.

Many academics inside and outside China question whether the growing
number of clubs is enough to foster creativity because the Chinese system
still requires students to specialize from an early age. Most students
choose their major before going to a university, and then enter highly
focused academic programs in which they have only a handful of electives.

Chinese employers tend to look for specialized students who can fill
specific roles immediately. They have shown less interest in the long-term
training of other types of students, like humanities majors.

Foreign-owned corporations in China often use Chinese graduates
differently, putting more emphasis on long-term career development through
a variety of assignments to build a trainee’s ability to understand
complex issues, work in teams and lead.

Ms. Long, for example, spent her first two years as a trainee at BASF
rotating through marketing, the performance management division and the
business operations department, before settling in business operations,
tracking sales and other reports from BASF units around China.

Graduates like Ms. Long from the country’s top 20 universities are among
the best in the world, but multinationals are more able to make use of
them than hierarchical Chinese companies, said Joerg Wuttke, BASF’s chief
representative in China.

“Where does the seed land — on a rock or on fertile ground?” he said. “We
benefit by being able to hire all these talented graduates.”

Ready to Take On America

China already has the world’s largest auto industry, producing twice as
many cars and trucks last year as the United States or Japan. But it
exports virtually none of those cars to the West — yet.

Chinese automakers and policy makers have been preparing for years to
follow the example of Japan and South Korea. But reaching that goal will
require at least four big advances: designing more attractive cars and
engines, improving reliability, developing local technologies that do not
depend on patents leased from foreign automakers, and understanding
overseas buyers and how to market to them.

Chinese officials say that a big reason they are pouring billions of
dollars into the development of electric and hybrid cars is that they hope
to leapfrog the West and develop indigenous technologies before other
countries do.

Progress on energy-saving and less polluting technologies could give
Chinese companies an advantage, for example, when the New York City Taxi
and Limousine Commission decides in 2021 what model or models the city’s
fleets will be required to buy next. The city has been asking for improved
fuel efficiency in taxis.

But while China’s lavish investments on next-generation automotive
technologies have drawn international attention, the country is also
trying to develop the soft side of international business: marketers,
advertising specialists and others who can intuit what overseas customers
really want.

Mr. Li, the Geely chairman, grew up as a son of peasant farmers in
east-central China. But he has become one of his country’s wealthiest auto
tycoons by building inexpensive cars that have just enough pizazz to be
appealing. His holding company, Geely Group, bought Volvo Cars of Sweden
from Ford in 2010, and he now wants to take on the West.

Geely is starting elaborate market research in Britain to determine which
of its models will be popular there. That is the leading edge of what is
likely to be a full-fledged assault by Chinese automakers on Western
markets by 2015.

Mr. Li is also far along on another goal, training his own managers. His
companies hire the best graduates from the three campuses he has founded.
Sanya University is ramping up international business education. Students
there, like Ms. Zhang, try to learn as much as possible about foreign
markets: their languages, cultural touchstones and more.

She is majoring in English, but her favorite courses have been in
marketing. She works in her spare time as a guide for international
conferences and sporting events here, to gain more exposure to native
English speakers. She reads actively about automotive trends. And she
brims with confidence about her ability to persuade New York City to buy
Geely cars for taxis.

“The status of China is growing all the time; we’ve got a really important
role in international markets,” she said in fluent English. “We need the
capability to communicate with foreigners.”