Op-Ed Contributors

Guide them along the right path

By Wang Bo (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-08 10:37

Guide them along the right path Some college graduates will face more difficulty than others in finding a job this year. But that is nothing new. What is new is that graduates in popular subjects are no longer in great demand in the job market.

Beijing Graduates Employment Report 2009 shows that most of the unemployed graduates from the 2008 batch have majored in five popular subjects: law, business administration, computer science and technology, English, and information management and system. Surveys in Shanghai and Hunan province have thrown up the same result.

Many of the graduates chose the subjects because to increase their chances of getting a good job and to have a successful career after four years of college. But the outcome has been just the opposite. Some experts say the graduates' professional capabilities don't measure up to the demands of the job market or that they chose the wrong subjects. So no one can be blamed for their failure to get a job.

The fact is students alone do not choose the subjects they want to major in. Their parents and elders, and the trend of the job market, plays a bigger role in determining their choice. Many parents choose the subjects for their children in college, hoping that their experience and foresight would help their wards get a job more easily (or quickly). For most parents, the sole criterion is whether their children can land a good job after graduation. As our social appraisal system becomes increasingly utilitarian, parents are sacrificing their wards' interests and free choice in their desperate bid to make them stand out in the crowd.

But unemployment is the result of oversupply of manpower, too. If we step back to the year when today's jobless graduates took the National College Entrance Exam, we'll see that many of the colleges had increased the number of enrollments. Colleges admit students according to the market-oriented logic, too. As a result, students and their parents assume that the subjects in which the colleges are enrolling more than the normal number of students are the best bet to get a good job. Students and their parents do not seem to realize that college authorities seldom think what the demand and supply would be in the job market four years later, when the freshmen would graduate.

It is true that graduates in popular majors enjoy a comparatively high reckoning in society. But this higher "status" is reduced to naught if they cannot land a good job. College professors play an instrumental role in undergraduates' lives. So they should share the responsibility of guiding students toward a better future. If many of the students cannot measure up to the professional competence demanded by potential employers, the teachers, too, have to share the blame.

The rules of the job market have turned students into chess pieces. Their success is determined not by themselves but by players, who more often than not cannot be seen. It's ironic then to see some social authorities blame the students for being unable to get a job, especially because the latter don't set the rules of the game. Some may argue that competition is cruel and we should be aware of individual variations when it comes to competence. But what we are talking about here are not individuals, but a group - in fact, a large group of graduates. They start out with high hopes of leading a good life. But many among them find it difficult to even earn a decent living. They deserve better social attention, and policymakers should rethink their strategies to help them emerge out of difficult situations with their capabilities and confidence intact.