For young Chinese people, going to university is a hugely different experience to their peers in the West. They didn’t toil through the gaokao, take extra classes, and bust their guts to meet their parents’ expectations only to doss around for a few years earning a degree that might not guarantee them a job, as is often the case in the West. But apart from the college experience, the subjects Chinese undergraduates choose to study are different from their Western counterparts’, and even their peers in India and Japan. So what are the differences, and what do they imply for the future of China?

 

Without a doubt, the most popular degree subject in China is engineering, and the most revered place to study it is Tsinghua University, like Hu Jintao and other Party bigwigs did. While the USA produces 60,000 engineering graduates each year, China churns out a massive 600,000. The inherent differences in the Chinese and Western ways of learning may explain why China’s strengths lie in pragmatic fields such as engineering. The rote learning methods favoured in Chinese schools suit science and technology better than arts and humanities, where the emphasis is on thinking around the subject. For a country that is still developing, a glut of engineers can only be a good thing.

Thanks to similarities in population size and development rate, India is naturally compared to China. Indian independence occurred around the time of the formation of the People’s Republic, and both Deng Xiaoping and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, stressed the importance of learning in the development of their nations. In fact, Eastern education since the 1940s has primarily focused on developing and building countries. As it happens, China is trumping India when it comes to university enrolment, with 22% of school leavers entering higher education compared to 12% in India (last figures from UNESCO Institute of Statistics, 2006). Indian undergraduates are choosing to study medicine and computer science over engineering, and are ahead of China when it comes to technology. This is due to the Indian Action Plan which ensured that every school, college, university and hospital was connected to the internet by 2003.

In Japan, the most popular majors are the social sciences, especially business, law, and accounting. In a country that is so business driven, this trend is unsurprising. Nearly 40% of students graduate with a degree in social science, compared to just 17% who graduate as engineers. This is a sharp contrast to China, but is unsurprising when you consider that Japan is at a much later stage of development, and needs more accountants, lawyers and salary men than engineers.

The British education system presents a cautionary tale. It has been on a long and picturesque downhill hike since the education reforms of the 1960s and 70s when the tripartite grammar school structure was scrapped in favor of a supposedly egalitarian comprehensive system. In the late 90s, New Labour’s misguided promise to have 50% of all young people in higher education by the end of their tenure spawned a raft of “Mickey Mouse” majors (Golf Club Management Studies, anyone?) and sneakily turned former polytechnics and tertiary colleges into full-blown universities. Having half of Britain’s youth in further study might sound like a noble idea, but when it happens at the expense of the traditional trades like plumbing and carpentry – jobs which are now frequently performed in the UK by Poles and other skilled migrants.

The general decline of the British education system has encouraged less able students to pursue higher education, popularizing so called “soft” subjects like Media Studies, Design Studies – actually, anything with Studies in its name. Although Law, Business, Management, and Computer Science all feature in the top 10 British majors, there is a shortage of science graduates. Chris Humphries, head of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, says that the lack of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates has reached “scary levels”, while the decline in the sciences forced former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to offer financial support to graduates to retrain as science teachers. Many in Britain and outside it are quick to criticize the government’s policy on immigration, but with so many skills lacking in the native population, the knee-jerk reaction is obviously to recruit from overseas.

The USA is suffering a lack of computer scientists. This major lags in 9th place in the Princeton Review of top 10 American degree subjects, with Business Administration and Management coming in first followed by Psychology, Elementary Education, Biology and Nursing. Whether they are discouraged from studying computers because of the dot com bust or fearful that their potential jobs will be outsourced, high school graduates are abandoning the idea of computer science in droves, leaving a huge gap between the demand for software engineers and the supply. Part of President Obama’s Science Plan is to create outreach projects in schools to target untapped talent before it is too late.

Some experts believe that China and India’s graduates will tip the balance of what the countries will offer the rest of the world in the future. Pete Engardio wrote in an article for BusinessWeek, “China and India’s greatest impact on the global economy for the foreseeable future will not be through their products, but rather as a source of skilled labor.”
 

Related Links
Do Chinese Universities Get a Passing Grade?
China Fails to Retain Scholars in Spite of Economic Growth
Differences in the Chinese and American University Experiences

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