Vocational push as China moves toward a more innovative future
Print Edition
Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in China’s countryside: vocational education parks.
Cities around the country are carving out tracts of land for school parks — dubbed “education factories” — designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.
Fueling the drive are government subsidies and targets to increase the number of skilled workers, part of a push to redirect China’s economy away from its investment-led past toward a more innovative, high-tech future.
But the moves come as many existing vocational schools struggle to live up to their promise.
“You can build as much as you want, but unless you get good teachers, good curriculum and a system that assesses and rewards high performing schools with more resources, it’s just going to be a waste of money,” says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford University and the author of many papers on vocational education in China.
Raising skill levels
There is no question China needs to raise skill levels, says Wayne Zhang, who runs a home decor products factory in northeastern China. Finding skilled workers to increase capacity or make more complex products is increasingly hard, he says. Of the 100 such staff he set out to hire last year, he has only been able to find 60.
As of 2010, just 24 percent of China’s workforce had attended at least some upper secondary school, compared with an OECD average of 74 percent, according to a study by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University in February.
As the labor force shrinks and ages, China needs to coax more productivity out of each worker, it said. Training could help avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and, in theory, narrow a widening income gap that threatens social stability.
According to reports, Lanzhou, capital of northwest China’s Gansu Province, expects to attract more than 30 schools and 150,000 students to its vocational school park opening in 2017. Ganzhou, in east China’s Jiangxi Province, is said to be building a vocational school district which hopes to have at least 10 vocational schools and more than 100,000 students when it opens in 2018. The provinces of Yunnan in the southwest, Shandong in the east and Hunan in the center all have vocational school parks.
And yet, many Chinese vocational schools already struggle to attract students. Vocational schools, almost all state-run, are usually high schools, although China is pushing to create more vocational universities.
But vocational education lacks the prestige of a conventional high school and many teachers have never worked in the industries they are preparing students to join.
One study of computing schools found that only 10 percent of teachers had worked in the sector. And too often, their critics say, the courses and teaching methods they offer are out of step with the demands of the economy.
In a rural area of Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou Province, tree-covered hills are being razed to make room for the Qingzhen Vocational Education City.
Seventeen schools have already agreed to be part of the zone, including agricultural engineering, transport, construction and automotive schools. The zone has capacity for 35 schools and 300,000 students.
At Guizhou Machinery Industry School, where enrolment is expected to increase from about 7,000 students this year to 10,000 in 2016, vice president Xu Guoqing says grouping schools together in a new district will help dispel parents’ concerns about the quality of vocational education.
All of the students at the Guizhou school are on full scholarships funded by the provincial government. Because they come from poor areas, more than 80 percent of students receive a 2,000 yuan (US$315) annual living expenses stipend from the central government.
Students said they appreciated the schools’ focus on practical skills, rather than the theory taught in conventional high school or university.
“Going to class feels like going to work in a factory,” said Wu Wei, a student at the construction school.
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