Why Chinese University Grads Can't Get Jobs

There's an interesting series of short opinion pieces in today's New York Times on why Chinese University grads have such a high level of unemployment (and, one presumes, underemployment). The unfortunate fact is that universities here don't provide the skills to its students that most employers want. The article, Room For Debate: Educated and Fearing the Future in China is here.

And here's my comment. This has been submitted to the Times, but one of the privileges of having your own blog is that I decided what what to publish. And so, here it is:

As a former dean at one of Beijing University's business schools (it has two, believe it or not) and a former professor of business at another top university in China, I can tell you that, by and large, only one of your commentators actually gets what's going on in China with university graduates. Huang Yasheng has hit the bull's eye with his comments. The Chinese educational system and, in particular, its top universities are culturally and politically incapable of delivering an education that prizes innovation, critical thinking, intellectual independence and strength of character, let alone the personal confidence to weave all of those characteristics (all closely related) together in any set of functional skills. I often tell people (including officials in China's educational hierarchy) that the Chinese educational system most closely resembles a game of "Whack-a-Mole"; any attempt by students to stick their heads up out of the obscurity of the masses is likely to get them whacked over the head, intellectually speaking. The sad fact is that the system repeatedly asks for those very characteristics that it actively discourages in its students. And given China's history of punishing cultural and intellectual outliers, this is not likely to change anytime soon.