China’s top two leaders recently presided over a rare discussion on vocational education where they pushed for major changes to the country’s retrograde technical schools.
Political leaders everywhere are known to pay lip service to the need for improvements in education, but concern over China’s vocational schools is likely more than that just political bluster. That’s because the quality of the country’s lower-level technical schools could have a major impact on the country’s future economic growth.
As China looks to climb into the ranks of developed nations, one of its main goals is to evolve beyond serving as the world’s factory floor. One barrier to achieving that goal, analysts and education officials say, is the country’s lack of highly-skilled workers.
Premier Li Keqiang emphasized that point at Monday’s meeting, saying a “massive skilled labor force” was needed to upgrade the “made in China” label, “from ‘adequate’ to ‘high-quality’ and ‘premium’” (in Chinese).
Mr. Li was talking at an unusual national-level work conference on vocational education – only the 3rd such conference to be held in China since 1978. China’s President Xi Jinping gave the opening remarks, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, signifying the level of importance China’s leadership places on the topic.
The attention is warranted: China’s vocational programs — which teach practical skills ranging from carpentry to forestry and encompass more than 29 million students, according to Xinhua — have been badly neglected when compared with the country’s rapidly multiplying universities. Often criticized for being poorly equipped, they are also poorly managed and have trouble finding qualified teachers, experts say.
“In the vast majority of vocational education schools in China, kids are not learning anything, especially in rural areas,” said Scott Rozelle, director of Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program, which studies China’s vocational schools. “In studies in central and northwest China, we found dropout rates of 50% in the first two years of these programs.”
Mr. Rozelle said that China’s vocational schools are the only segment of China’s educational system that lacks an evaluation system, so it is difficult to tell which schools are good and which subpar.
China is currently home to 13,600 vocation schools and colleges, which provide a large chunk of the country’s workers in labor-intensive industries. According to government estimates, they are expected to attract more than 38 million students by 2020.
The government is now pushing a number of changes to the vocational school system, including requiring local government to allocate a standard budget for vocational schools as they do for regular colleges, according to Xinhua. Private investors and non-governmental organizations are also encouraged to sponsor vocational schools, and private vocational schools will enjoy preferential loans from banks.
The state-run China Daily newspaper called the government’s recent attention to vocational schools “unprecedented”. But the devil is in the details. It won’t be clear until later how much money local governments will actually budget to upgrading the vocational school system and what kind of incentives there will be to improve.
via A Neglected Problem in China’s Education System – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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