Crazy Pursuit for Graduate Education, an Ailing Personnel System

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, January 27, 2003

Crazy Pursuit for Graduate Education, an Ailing Personnel System

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China's two-day graduate entrance examination of the year 2003 ended on January 19. Statistics show that the registrations hit a record high of nearly 800,000 candidates fighting for 217,000 enrolment quotas, a competition no less fiercer than the nation's college entrance examination. The craze for postgraduate studies has become something abnormal, which has behind it a malady in China's personnel system pointed out an article recently carried on China News Week.

Since the end of the 1990s, the article said, the Chinese people have begun to feel a stuffy atmosphere of a "society of educational certificate". Most students take the examination for the only purpose of finding a good job after graduation, since it is the only way leading them to high degree with a high income and a rosy future. In a time of knowledge economy, the highest pursuit in the eyes of many people is to seek for the so-called "three highs", namely to begin with a high degree in education, followed by a high income and finally to realize a higher comfort in life.

Due to drawbacks in China's personnel system, especially the people in charge of employment work who, short of basic wits for sizing a person, rely solely on degrees as the criteria for personnel selection. This leads to a blind and serious "diploma cult" in society as a whole and further to come to form the core of "knowledge myth". While the number of graduate students is surging up, the basic qualification among them is dropping sharply, with many of them having high scores but poor in competence.

A more worrying question is that while the fighting for high degrees is going on fiercely, large number of urban children are forced to quit school, and children of migrant workers in cities are deprived of the rights for basic education. On the one hand is knowledge and degree surplus, and large waste of educational resources, yet on the other is the poverty and desperate longing for schooling. The ill balance is brewing a wide social crisis and now it is the high time for China to implement "soft landing" for postgraduate education by shifting its focus onto the educational strategy.

By PD Online Staff Li Heng

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