So last week I was in the country side, in a pastoral area. It was fantastic. Truly fantastic. There were horse races. I was called Mr. Jersey (in reference to a popular and well-known sketch). Good stuff. But in the course of my time there, something hit me: there are an amazing number of unemployed college graduates on the plateau at the moment, and the number is only increasing. They no longer want to be pastoralists or farmers. Their educational experience has given them a taste for the city life. But the city life has a limited number of job opportunities, and even fewer for which they are actually trained.
Don't believe me? Let's break it down. A vast majority of T people out here who are fortunate enough to obtain university education, do so at a "normal school" (for the training of teachers), or a nationalities university (for the training of cadres). Neither of these schools have much in the way of science, engineering, or even math. They focus on language, education, policy, and the like. This results in a situation in which hundreds of students graduate each year, with the same basic education. They are the prides of their families (not infrequently the first in their families to attain such an achievement) and communities. Many of them are proud to study almost exclusively in Tbtn. It shows loyalty to their ethnic group, and a keen thirst for knowledge of their native culture. Do you see the problem yet? Maybe not. Education is a good thing. No doubt about it. But the resulting social situation is actually far more ambivalent (as I suppose it likely is in many places including the USofA). At present, a large number of people, accustomed to urban living, and reluctant to return to their previous lifestyles graduate each year. They are trained in a very limited set of skills: Tbtn literature, C to T translation, English, linguistics, etc. Because of this limitation, they are left competing for a narrow range of jobs: frequently NGO work, gov't jobs, or teaching. NGO work is drying up. As China gets wealthier, less money comes in from the foreign sources that traditionally underpinned the NGO field on the plateau. The second and third options are stable positions. In order to "fight" corruption, they've turned the job-search into the semblance of a meritocracy wherein a battery of tests decides job placement. But the tests require Chinese language proficiency, which arguably should not be part of the job requirements for, say, an English or Tbtn teaching position. Chinese language proficiency is difficult to come by when you With hundreds of graduates each year and a very limited number of job openings available (I have heard of 500 people taking the tests for 10 positions), you have an ever-growing number of unemployed literati. This is also a problem all over the country, but particularly here in Qinghai. Surely, one would think, it would be in everyone's interest to increase the education options, broadening the fields available for study both at the secondary and post-secondary levels. It would be a slow process, and would require training an even greater number of people with this sort of education. As far as I can tell, Math and Science training are particularly poor in these areas, though. And this is perhaps the biggest obstacle at all levels. And that's my USD .02
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |