CHAPTER 1: Your Number One Problem: The Talent Shortage

The Supply Side: Quantity and Quality of Graduates in China

Quantity Issues

China is committed to upgrading its universities, but there are two
problems:

• The state university sector can barely keep up with demand.
• The types of courses they emphasize tend to be in the sciences and technology.

China claims to have at least 17 million university students, but that’s out of a population of 1.3 billion people. (The United States has roughly the same number of college students from a population of 390 million.)¹ But it’s not just a matter of quantity.

Even though the Chinese government now spends more on education than ever before, that spending has not kept pace with economic growth. Education spending has been almost static in proportion to the total economy. A 1993 target to spend 4 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) on education by 2000 remained unmet even in 2007, so the goal was shifted. The government now hopes to meet that 4 percent figure by 2010.²

A 1986 local government requirement that all children receive at least nine years of education was not combined with an adequate funding increase; as a result, China missed this target as well. Nor have funding increases been adequate to meet the more than threefold increase in the number of tertiary students since 1999. The dilemma will only grow. There are around 17 million tertiary students today; by 2010, there will be approximately 25 million. [more...]

1. From Asia Future Shock: Business Crisis and Opportunity in the Coming Years (chapter 10), by Michael Backman, 2007, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2. From “Chaos in the Classrooms,” a 2006 article that appeared in The Economist, 380, pp. 32–33. 

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