No Degrees Necessary
The appeal of vocational schools is growing partly in response to the growing realization that a Chinese university degree can be a ticket to nowhere. When China’s schools reopened after the Cultural Revolution, there weren’t enough universities to accommodate a generation of disenfranchised scholars. Now the opposite is true. In the last seven years the number of Chinese college graduates has quintupled, reaching 4.1 million this year. But the National Development and Reform Commission reports that at least 60 percent of these graduates can’t find work....