Zou Nan is a professor with a problem: Not enough of his textbooks are up to date or relevant to his discipline.
The 35-year-old expert on mass-transportation systems returned to China in 2009 after a decade in the United States, during which he helped design Washington’s post-September 11 evacuation plan, traffic-management flows for interstate highways, and hurricane-emergency protocols for Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
With China’s breakneck economic growth throwing up traffic-choked new cities at warp speed, he felt the urge “to do something” back home, and returned as vice dean of control science and engineering at Shandong University, halfway between Beijing and Shanghai.
While his field is becoming ever more multidisciplinary—it straddles urban planning, mechanical and computer engineering, and logistics—he quickly found that Chinese textbooks have not. Much of what students are learning, he says, is based on American strategies from the 1970s. More-recent research has “not yet been well documented in textbooks in China,” he says. “There is a gap here.”
Mr. Zou’s difficulties are symptomatic of a problem that is acute here: How can academic programs keep pace with economic and technological changes? In China the global challenges of fast-evolving technology and multidisciplinary studies are complicated by the newness of the market. Only 40 years ago, professors were condemned to manual labor if suspected of capitalist sympathies, and most universities were shut down during the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
It is not only Mr. Zou who worries about employability. The government is preoccupied with ensuring that China’s growing pool of college graduates finds jobs; about 23 percent of the 6.5 million who graduated in 2011 are still out of work.
Government leaders regularly promise action. In the past five years, the Ministry of Education has been instructing universities to scrap majors in which fewer than half of their students find jobs. And a growing patchwork of policies seeks to cement relationships between industry and academe, modernize curricula, and improve teaching.
In March the finance and education ministries jointly unveiled a $317-million fund to create 1,000 sites where students could get work experience, half of them at municipal, or “second tier,” universities. Colleges can request funds for such projects as on-campus corporate laboratories and extra internships.
The government has directed most of its efforts toward improving engineering education, a natural move for a country that has huge faith in science and technology. An “excellent engineer” education-and-training program, created in June 2010, seeks to send 30 percent of student engineers into firms to work on projects with commercial potential. More than 60 universities have joined the effort.
Government programs also encourage universities to design new majors that focus on emerging industries like bioengineering and alternative energy.
Fixing Old Problems
Those piecemeal efforts are filling gaps left after economic reforms swept away Soviet-style planning. But in some ways those reforms have hampered the ability of universities to prepare students for the work force.
“If you look back to the 50s, the university curriculum was closely linked to economic needs,” says Qiang Zha, an education professor at York University, in Canada, who studies higher education in China. Chinese universities were under the control of industries and worked with them to pump out graduates assigned to jobs for life. The names of dozens of specialized universities for telecommunications, agriculture, and transportation echo that era.
An ambitious overhaul of higher education in 1999 set out to professionalize and expand the system, cutting the industrial tethers and putting universities under the Ministry of Education and its regional bureaus.
“Structurally, there was no connection with industry” after 2000, says Cha Jianzhong, China’s Unesco chair on cooperation between higher-engineering education and industries.
The 1999 reforms achieved much, producing a mass education system and a new white-collar class. Yet companies in Beijing and elsewhere struggle to find good staff despite a surfeit of graduates.
“There has been a massive increase in student numbers, but quality is low,” says Wen Qinshan, human-resources director of Fesco, a recruitment agency for 10,000 Beijing-based foreign companies. “Curriculum design does not suit market developments,” he says, citing unfilled demand in fields such as control engineering, information technology, and materials science.
Some observers say government policies are misguided. Mr. Cha, a pugnacious man who talks in bullet points, says that a plan to create fourth-year internships is too little, too late, and that it seeks uniformity of educational approaches. “Should a local college have the same goal as Tsinghua University?” he asks. “This is ridiculous because all colleges have different resources.”
Mr. Cha gives dozens of speeches each year around the country advocating deeper integration of coursework and external projects. Right now, he says, industry linkages are overly reliant on the efforts of individual professors.
Critics also say many engineering and technology courses are too narrow, producing students whose shallow knowledge leaves them unable to carry out sophisticated assignments—especially ones that draw on a variety of disciplines—or to solve problems on their own.
Zhang Bo earned his bachelor’s degree at the prestigious Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, graduating in 2007.
In hindsight, he says, he realized that what he had learned in the classroom was fairly superficial: “After graduation, I found it was enough if you worked for management or sales in the industry, but if you wanted to do program development, it was not enough.”
He returned to receive his master’s degree and recently began working for Ericsson’s R&D center in Beijing, testing designs of mobile-phone transmitters. He credits his plum position to “project experience during my master’s degree.”
“There’s an overload of graduates coming out of universities with the ability to do basic jobs, but they’re not getting people who can do project management,” confirms Denis F. Simon, vice provost for the Office of China Initiatives and Strategy at Arizona State University, and an expert on relationships between scientists and business.
His research for Intel in 2007 found that courses in software and engineering were often too rudimentary for commercial needs. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he advises Chinese universities on curriculum redesign.
Deadwood Faculty
Two possibly more intractable problems are the country’s deadwood faculty and dull teaching, observers say.
When universities reopened in 1978, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the new generation of faculty had limited opportunities. In 2000 only 10 percent of Chinese professors had Ph.D.'s, says the University of Nottingham sociologist Cao Cong, who wrote a 2009 book with Mr. Simon on the anatomy of China’s technological elite. Things have improved since then, but there is still a gulf between China’s two dozen or so elite universities and the rest. About 20 percent of his professors had Ph.D.'s, estimates Mr. Zhang, who attended a national-level, or “first tier,” university.
Before university reforms began, in the late 1990s, professors were trained to teach from textbooks. The norm is still “a one-way download,” says Mr. Simon. Practices as automatic to American professors as giving out course outlines and reading lists are rare in the China, limiting students’ ability to engage with the subject matter, says Guo Fu, dean of academic affairs at the Beijing University of Technology, who spent six years at Michigan State University.
Robert Daley, director of the Maryland China Initiative at the University of Maryland at College Park, runs programs to introduce Chinese university presidents and senior faculty members to American academic practices. In China, he says, reformers are aware that the lack of trained faculty is “the greatest obstacle to being able to improve universities.”
Students who struggle the most to find work are often those from midlevel universities that were the biggest beneficiaries of government plans to expand higher-education enrollments. In Hubei Province, a middle-income region in central China, a recent survey found that 88 percent of companies needed hires, yet nearly half of graduates—44 percent—took two months to find their first jobs. A similar number of students were pessimistic about their employment prospects.
Elite universities have an easier time attracting industries linked to fast-developing disciplines. For example, Beijing Jiaotong University, which is known for electrical and mechanical engineering, has more than 300 corporate partners nationwide for its software department alone. And 70 percent of the department’s faculty have industry experience, says Mr. Cha.
At the other end of the spectrum, vocational colleges can be nimble at adapting to market needs. Unburdened by pressure to compete with research universities, they can more easily design courses with the corporate sector, though China’s “third tier” colleges, as they are known, are also notorious for dismal quality and artificially inflated employment statistics.
A Success Story
Beijing City University—a private vocational college located in the city’s university district—is one of China’s third-tier success stories.
The university’s president, Liu Lin, says he spent time at a Los Angeles community college in 1996 and applied what he saw there to remodel his college.
He does not hesitate to toss successful majors if they are becoming commonplace. Programs on TV engineering and early digital media such as DVD’s have been pushed aside for bioengineering and cybersecurity (a suggestion from a corporate contact who had been hacked by rivals).
All programs undergo annual reviews, using detailed interviews with companies and former students. Teaching relies heavily on some 970 adjunct professors from industry, says Mr. Liu. Professors are rewarded for industry involvement rather than published articles, he says, praising a civil engineer who designs real-estate projects.
The campus itself has a distinctly corporate feel. In the main building, fine wood panels lend a silky sheen to corridor walls. Elegant, metal-inlaid door signs list the laboratories—finance, digital imaging, gemology.
In some classrooms, students learn directly from future employers. Finance majors wear Shanghai Pudong Development Bank’s crisply tailored uniforms as an instructor from the bank explains on-screen instructions about foreign-exchange transactions. With e-banking rendering current textbooks meaningless, the bank prefers to train future hires while they’re still in college. It invests heavily in this training—sending seven senior staff for a total of 32 hours each week—but ends up hiring roughly 60 percent of the students, says Li Zhengtai, who heads the anti-money-laundering unit.
Other institutions have had less success finding corporate partners. “It’s not easy to find a company that’s willing to get involved in this program, because it will be a burden for them,” says Mr. Zou, Shandong’s transportation-systems expert, of the flagship “excellent engineers” scheme. “It’s hard to find the right co-adviser to educate the students and make sure the students can be really knowledgeable and produce innovative processes.”
The city of Beijing, through its municipal education committee, is helping jump-start some of the partnerships by bringing together local universities and local companies.
Ties to Industry
Beijing University of Technology has had such a partnership with Hybroad, a midsize electronics firm, for several years. The company provides four-month internships for 10 seniors each year. “The subjects they’re studying are real projects for the company,” says Liu Dajun, the company’s vice president. One pair is designing the standby switch on a device for watching 3-D TV online. They have provisional job offers.
The university has an ambitious program of reforms under a newly appointed president, Guo Guangsheng. Mr. Guo has said that he wants 25 percent of the faculty to come from abroad. “As a local university,” he says, “we have to spend more energy, more time, even more money to bring in teachers of high quality.” He is particularly proud of a faculty member who tracked down and brought home a graduate who was teaching in Sweden.
The university has also earned the education ministry’s approval to recruit students for two new majors: new-energy engineering and the “Internet of Things,” about the potential for everyday objects to be coded for wireless communication. The university has eliminated obsolete majors, including one in industrial safety, which focused on outmoded industries.
The university is also trying to develop coursework with industry and is looking to the West for ideas on curricular reform, such as allowing students to change their majors after the first year and offering general-education courses to freshmen.
Government support for university administrators to explore overseas practices is pushing change into the lower layers of the higher-education system, and beyond the country’s wealthy regions. Provincial governments are paying for college visits to institutions in the United States. Such meetings have led to curricular reforms at Chongqing University and Sichuan University, both in China’s southwest, and at two universities in the northern port of Dalian. A lot depends on the interest of university presidents and how cosmopolitan regional officials are, says Mr. Simon, of Arizona State.
International bridges provided by American programs, returned alumni, and foreign investment “are the critical catalyst that’s helping to raise the knowledge pool in Chinese universities,” he says, describing how Intel’s $2.5-billion investment in the city of Dalian sent Dalian University of Technology prospecting for academic strategies that reach beyond IT to influence students’ lab work in biology and other disciplines.
“This is a 10- to 15-year proposition,” says Mr. Simon. “It’s something that’s going to take a decade or more to really feel the serious impact.”
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