Thought du Jour

In the regular Chinese school system, students did not speak in class; often they did not even take notes until the teacher told them to. They studied a set curriculum determined by a government committee. Teachers pitted students against one another to make them study harder, and the entire system revolved around tests – a test to get into a good middle school, then a good high school, and finally a good college or any college at all. Like the imperial civil service exam, the educational system was designed to reward the few. Every year, the equivalent of only 11 percent of the freshman-age population entered college. Students who fell off that track were channeled into vocational schools to learn employable skills like machine tool operation and auto repair, but the curriculum was generally so outdated that the schools functioned more like holding pens for the students until they went out to work.

China is trying to reform its education system. Some teachers have embraced ‘quality education’, which emphasizes student creativity and initiative over rote learning. To that end, richer, more progressive schools have introduced electives such as arts and music. Making higher education more accessible is another goal: In recent years, the government has sharply expanded college enrollment. But education remains one of the most conservative areas of Chinese society, burdened by hidebound teachers and administrators, political constraints, and a historical obsession with test scores.

Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China (Picador, 2010), pp. 182-183.

The book is interesting throughout. Ms Chang documents the lives of two young migrant workers in Dongguan, an industrial city in central Guangdong province – near Hong Kong, on the mainland in the Pearl River Delta. The title of the first edition (hardcover, 2008) is Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. Leslie Chang is a Chinese-American journalist who lived ten years in China as correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Today’s New York Times has an article describing the glut of university graduates seeking work in China. The author focuses on supply and demand, but much of the problem is undoubtedly a result of  the poor quality and irrelevance (for employment) of much university education in China.

In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising. ….

In a kind of cruel reversal, China’s old migrant class — uneducated villagers who flocked to factory towns to make goods for export — are now in high demand, with spot labor shortages and tighter government oversight driving up blue-collar wages.

But the supply of those trained in accounting, finance and computer programming now seems limitless, and their value has plunged. ….

Chinese sociologists have come up with a new term for educated young people who move in search of work …: the ant tribe. It is a reference to their immense numbers — at least 100,000 in Beijing alone — and to the fact that they often settle into crowded neighborhoods, toiling for wages that would give even low-paid factory workers pause.

“Like ants, they gather in colonies, sometimes underground in basements, and work long and hard,” said Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing. ….

Given the glut of underemployed graduates, Mr. Peng [Xizhe, dean of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai,] suggested that young people either shift to more practical vocations like nursing and teaching or recalibrated their expectations. “It’s O.K. if they want to try a few years seeking their fortune, but if they stay too long in places like Beijing or Shanghai, they will find trouble for themselves and trouble for society,” he said.

Andrew Jacobs, “China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs”, New York Times, 12 December 2010.

Shanghai, which participated for the first time in the OECD’s global survey of 15-year-old students, astounded everyone with its results. Shanghai students scored first in all three PISA subjects – reading, maths and science – and in each was ahead of the pack by a large margin. Shanghai scores for reading averaged 556, compared to 539 for second-placed Korea. In maths and science Shanghai students did even better, with average scores of 600 and 575, well above second-placed Singapore (562) in maths and Finland (554) in science.

Journalist Henry Mance examines the reasons for Shanghai’s success.

So why did Shanghai do so well? The OECD points to Chinese school reforms: it was impressed by the initiative shown by teachers, who are now better paid, better trained and keen to mould their own curricula. Poor teachers are speedily replaced. China has also expanded school access, and moved away from learning by rote. ….

The OECD also points to cultural factors – widespread expectations of high performance, and pressure from parents. ….

If schools did well just because of hard work, then countries with similar cultures should see similar results. But Finland beats Sweden by a distance, Shanghai beats Taiwan, and Hong Kong beats Macau. Equally, if the schools themselves were uniquely important, then why do young Chinese immigrants do so well in UK classrooms? Culture and system almost certainly reinforce each other: with a merit-based system stimulating hard work, and vice-versa. ….

[A]ccording to medium-term data from Canada, students who do well on the Pisa survey are very likely to do well in higher education and the job market.

However, that correlation would not necessarily be repeated in China. For one thing, parental pressure eases once students get to universities. For another, Chinese universities have been accused of corruption in how they award degrees – which may undermine the incentives for hard work.

Henry Mance, “Why are Chinese schoolkids so good?”, beyond-brics, 7 December 2010.

There is much more at the link, which is not gated. Neither registration nor subscription is necessary to access the beyond-brics blog.

Henry Mance is a Marjorie Deane fellow at the Financial Times. He has written for BBC News, The Guardian newspaper and World Politics Review. He is now based in London, after three years in South America.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) yesterday released results for its 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests. PISA assesses reading, maths and scientific skills of representative 15-year-olds in about 65 countries (30 OECD member countries and 35 partner countries) every three years.

Shanghai and Hong Kong posted exceptionally strong performances, ranking 1st and 4th, respectively. Here is a list of the top ten performers in PISA 2009:

1.  Shanghai
2.  Korea*
3.  Finland*
4.  Hong Kong
5.  Singapore
6.  Canada*
7.  New Zealand*
8.  Japan*
9.  Australia*
10. Belgium*

(*) indicates the country is a member of OECD.

Shanghai and Hong Kong are not representative of China but Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education to the OECD, said the country should not be underestimated. “They have agile, mobile schools and a lot of parental pressure,” he said.

Citing further, as-yet unpublished OECD research, Mr Schleicher said: “We have actually done Pisa in 12 of the provinces in China. Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.” ….

The US came in at 14th [of 30 OECD countries], but its localised school system is extremely variable. Schools in the north-east US are the equal of those in seventh-placed Netherlands. In the mid-west, they are equivalent to 12th-placed Poland, In the west, they are as good as those in Italy (placed 23rd), but schools in the south are only as effective as those in Greece (placed 25th).

Chris Cook, “Shanghai tops global state school rankings”, Financial Times, 8 December 2010. (requires registration/subscription)

An ungated report is available at digitaljournal.com.

Full results are posted at oecd.org.

Hong Kong-based journalist Josh Noble has posted interesting excerpts from a note by Nicholas Smith, who is an equity analyst at the NYC brokerage firm MF Global. Nicholas Smith works in MF Global’s Tokyo office. Mr Noble provides no links to the note, so we are left with only bits of what Smith wrote. These bits are tiny, but provocative.

Today a note by MF Global’s Nicholas Smith – provocatively entitled ‘The Sweatshop that Roared’ – … [warned] that 1960s Japan was in much better shape than today’s China, principally because of one thing: education.

While policymakers in the western world fret about the many millions of graduates being churned out of China’s universities every year, Smith points not to the number, but to the quality of those graduates. Take engineers:

“The educational system produces far too few properly trained engineers. McKinsey did a study of China’s looming talent shortage in a 2005 report, interviewing 83 HR professionals involved in hiring in low-wage countries: it concluded that only 10% of China’s graduate job candidates are suitable for employment by multinationals. Small wonder foreign companies in China complain of a talent shortage.“

For those graduates that do find a job, there’s another problem.

“Pay for recent graduates is below that for unskilled migrant workers and over a million remained unemployed – a sign the education system is tragically failing the parents that saved for it, and the economy generally.”

Japan, says Smith, laid the foundations of its high-tech industry with education reforms dating back to the late 19th centry – which helped boost school attendance and literacy rates. China, by comparison, is still suffering from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution:

“The effects are felt not only in the thinness of the cream in industry senior management, but also in the quality of leadership and mentoring in universities. A recent study by the Chinese government revealed that a third of the 6,000 scientists at 6 of the country’s top institutions admitted to plagiarism or the outright fabrication of research data.”

Josh Noble, “Education: the thorn in China’s upside”, Beyond BRICs, 20 October 2010.

Beyond BRICs is an ungated FT blog.

[A] lack of integrity among researchers is hindering China’s potential and harming collaboration between Chinese scholars and their international counterparts, scholars in China and abroad say.

“If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic community,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of International Relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.”

Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn journal citations — a measure of innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research. ….

Fang Shimin, a muckraking writer who has become a well-known advocate for academic integrity, said the problem started with the state-run university system, where politically appointed bureaucrats have little expertise in the fields they oversee. Because competition for grants, housing perks and career advancement is so intense, officials base their decisions on the number of papers published.

“Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang ….

Andrew Jacobs, “Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent”, New York Times, 7 October 2010.