Vocational schools need reforming

China is striving for a transition to a service-oriented economy. But is it ready? Does it have the workers trained in the right skills?

Data from 2010 show that, while restaurants hired more than 6 million chefs, only 60,000 people, or 1 percent of the size of the job market, had studied the culinary arts in the country's vocational schools. In an even more striking contrast, while there are as many as 1.6 million companies registered as providers of temporary workers to help with the household chores, the enrollment of domestic service majors by intermediate vocational schools was no more than 5,000.

Who is failing China's chance of future development?

The Chinese media has pointed its finger at the country's archaic system of vocational education, where two main problems have been identified: the obsolete government administration and poor connection with job market realities.

Commenting on the overall situation, Zhang Lixin, an official from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said, in the job market for skilled labor, for every three vacancies there are only two qualified applicants.

And things are even worse at the senior technician level, half of the vacancies remain unfilled.

Not everyone with adequate funding can run a school in China. The government still doesn't welcome it - however strong the economy's demand for skilled labor and the central government's yearning for a successful transition from quantity to quality.

The approval procedure on establishing vocational schools is, according to Zhang Chunfeng, director of the higher education research center in Heilongjiang Agricultural Economy Vocational College, a remnant from the Soviet-type planned economy of half a century ago.

Also school principals are often government appointees, who answer solely to the educational department, not to the faculty and the students. And they usually are concerned with how to get promoted quickly and be appointed to manage a larger school or to sit in a more important office.

As a result, Zhang observed, the principals do not need to bother distinguishing their schools by their quality of service. They don't have to reduce the number of students they recruit to learn IT, logistics and accounting, where an oversupply in graduates has been reported, or expand their recruitment in fields related to public infrastructure development and in other technologies.

The government's school evaluation system is also problematic, said Wang Zhong, an education official in Changzhou, Jiangsu province.

Even though vocational schools are not supposed to be elitist institutions, their evaluation is still based on students' written work. Instead, he said, such schools should be evaluated on the basis of their students' practical performance.

China should take a look at the practices in other countries and adopt a third-party evaluation system for vocational schools, Wang suggested.

Meanwhile, many critics have criticized the outdated curriculum. Many, or perhaps too many, fields of study are designed for white-collar workers, leaving only a few fields for blue-collar workers.

Vocational schools and universities should be complementary to each other, said an article co-authored by Zhang Haishui and Hu Ruiwen, researchers in Shanghai New Century Human Resource Institute and Shanghai Municipal Academy of Educational Sciences.

The fields of study available in universities do not need to be offered in vocational schools. Enrollment should be cut down in the fields that are already in oversupply, such as accounting, traditional Chinese medicine, performing arts and financial services.

Whereas fields that are in high demand, such as culinary skills and leisure services, should be expanded.

Internship programs should become more available in China to bridge the gap between vocational schools and the job market, said Zhang Sheyu, a professor of education in Henan Institute of Science and Technology.