Commercialism, Idealism Spar In China’s Education Transformation

With this year’s gaokao college entrance exam now officially in the past, students and educators in China can return to the more serious business of learning at the thousands of Chinese universities that are churning out the country’s academics, entrepreneurs and business leaders of tomorrow. These centers of higher learning today are far different from the ones I encountered when I first came to China in 1987 to teach at a tiny institution called the Beijing Graduate School of Geology.
Before I begin with my look at how higher education in China has changed over the last quarter century, I want look quickly at the ridiculously hyped up event that the gaokao exam has become. That hype is largely the product of a Chinese media that is far more commercial today than it was 25 years ago, reflecting a similar commercialism that has taken root in China’s university system.

Even a media junkie like myself quickly tired of this year’s flood of reports on TV, on the Internet and in newspapers in the days around a national college entrance exam that has become a source of major anxiety for graduating high school seniors and their parents.

In the run-up to the exam I read stories about new measures to prevent cheating and precautions that parents were taking to make sure their children arrived at test sites on time. On the days of the exam, there were more stories about police actions to prevent traffic jams around test centers. There was even one quirky story about a girl here in Shanghai who wore four watches to the exam, and a tragic one about a student killed in a traffic accident outside a test center in Anhui province.

Thankfully all of the hype is now in the past, although I’m sure it will come back even stronger next year when the nation’s increasingly commercial and competitive media look for any and every possible angle to exploit the story.

That kind of hype was non-existent when I first came to China as a fresh college graduate in 1987 to teach at the Beijing Graduate School of Geology. In fact, the school where I taught didn’t even have undergraduate students back then, and instead was a very unglamorous training ground for around 1,000 future geologists.

I use the word “unglamorous” because it applies in two ways. On the one hand, the school itself at that time then consisted of a series of run-down, low-rise brick buildings that were hardly an exciting place to live and study. At the same time, geology was considered an undesirable profession because most jobs were located in remote locations, and most students would openly admit they were only there because they were rejected for more desirable majors.

I don’t know what the actual statistics are, but back then I was told that less than 10 percent of all Chinese high school graduates could go to college due to the shortage of places. That contrasts sharply with today, where most universities have expanded into colossal institutions that can admit most students who want a college education.

Even my own former school has become a formal university, the China University of Geosciences, and now hosts a student body of thousands in a wide variety of majors at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Of course the current university is unrecognizable from the one I worked at in 1987, with many of the older buildings now demolished to make way for more modern classrooms, dormitories, offices and other facilities.

So many changes have occurred between now and then that I’ll only describe a few that exemplify the broader transformation. One of the biggest changes lies in university teaching staff. Back in the 1980s, anyone with a college degree was considered an “intellectual” and thus could teach in a university. That situation was caused by the closure of many universities for much of the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in a scarcity of college graduates and even fewer graduate degree holders when universities finally began to reopen.

I remember being somewhat surprised on my arrival as a 23-year-old recent college graduate in 1987 when I discovered that many of the professors at the geology school were the same age as me and had no more than a college education. That was far different from the west where masters degrees and PhDs are required for the vast majority of university teaching jobs. I remember blushing with embarrassment every time someone would call me a “foreign expert” or refer to me as “professor”.

Today the landscape looks far different, and nearly all of my colleagues at the Fudan University Journalism School where I now teach hold PhDs. The courses we teach are also quite varied, with an increasing emphasis on subjects that are practical and appealing to students. Government-ordered political classes still exist alongside these more popular classes, reflecting the unusual mix of socialist- and capitalist-era elements that co-exist in today’s universities.

One of the other biggest changes between then and now is in tuitions. Back in the 1980s everything was free, and students even received government stipends to pay for their living expenses. I clearly remember those stipends because students frequently complained about how small they were, even though I often told them such stipends were non-existent in the US.

Those days of a free ride are now largely in the past, with universities like Fudan now charging tuitions that can go as high as tens of thousands of yuan for their most popular programs. Of course the student discontent continues, with complaints about high tuition now replacing the previous ones about low stipends.

At the end of the day, these and other changes in higher education are the result of a rapid economic transformation that has forced China to re-tool the way it teaches its young people to think. I personally believe that higher education in China has become a bit too commercial in the last decade, and that more emphasis is needed on innovation and critical thinking and less on who can attract the most students with “flavor of the day” majors.

A continuation of the ongoing transformation will be critical to determining whether China can maintain its current rapid growth rate by producing a new generation of professionals with the skills the economy needs to keep moving forward. It will also determine whether China can shed its current status as the world’s leading copycat and someday emerge as a true global leader and innovator.