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Higher Education Expansion in China and the ‘Ant Tribe’ Problem

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Abstract

College Enrolment Expansion policies have been implemented in China since 1999. Unfortunately, numbers of qualified teachers and the amount of educational funds input have not caught up with the pace of student intake. Even the curricula taught in colleges are outdated and work practice programmes are inefficient. As a result, new college graduates cannot meet the requirements of firms they wish to work for. Many graduates work in unskilled job positions with low pay. They are called the ‘Ant tribe’. We estimate that the accumulative number of persons in ‘Ant tribes’ had exceeded 3 million by 2010, and the corresponding cost to China’s annual GDP was over 0.22% in respect of effective labour input. Improvement in quality should take priority during the expansion of higher education.

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Notes

  1. Regular colleges include 4-year-term universities and 3-year term colleges, excluding adult higher education institutes and internet-based higher education institutes.

  2. Hukou is a household registration system in China, normally registering a person’s birth place. It has many restrictions for a person who wants to change their living/working area to another place that is not their Hukou region.

  3. From 1998 to 2003, the accumulative number of sacked workers from the state-owned enterprises was 28.13 million (Ministry of Finance of P.R.C., 2005).

  4. The gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education is the ratio of enroled students in colleges to the total population aged between 18 and 22.

  5. ‘985’ universities refers to the 39 state universities which the government expected to catch up with world-class universities. It is named after the date when China’s state chairman Jiang Zemin proposed this idea in Peking University’s 100th anniversary on 4 May 1998 (98 for the year and 5 for the month of May).

  6. ‘211’ universities refers to the 100 universities in China in which the government invested most funds for development, and expected them to be top-level universities in the 21st century (21 for the 21st century and 1 for the 100 universities).

  7. Informal sectors are sectors where salaries and chances of promotion are low. many of them do not provide social security to their employees. Informal sectors refer to small private enterprises in China.

  8. Normally over 4 people share a room and more than 20 people share a toilet (China Higher-education Student Information Center, 2010).

  9. According to the proposal A Plan of Education Revitalization for 21st Century, the student–teacher ratio would rise to 12:1 in 2005, but it rose to almost 17:1.

  10. The survey investigated more than 6,000 new college graduates and 44 enterprises.

  11. In the survey, 51.7% of firms (1,044 firms were investigated) chose ‘lack of work experience’ as their first reason for not hiring new college graduates.

  12. Undertaking further study means people become graduate students or undertake oversea studies.

  13. This calculation may include college graduates with low income who do not settle in groups or on city fringes.

  14. It includes joint-stock, affiliated, Co. Ltd, and foreign investment companies and so on.

  15. The large private companies are enterprises whose value of sales is above 5 million yuan per year.

  16. There are some measurements of effective labour input. One is the man-hour, which is calculated as the number of workers times working hours, though this cannot tell the difference between workers. For example, a technician working 1 hour is very different from a streamline operator working 1 hour — the technician’s productivity is higher than the operator’s. The measurement in personal wages (monthly or yearly) can reflect working hours and productivities, and makes labour input between different workers comparable. In this paper, we use wages as the measurement of effective labour input.

  17. The average wage of graduates from ‘211’ universities was 2,549 RMB per month, that of graduates from non-‘211’ but regular universities was 2,030 RMB, that of graduates from 3-year-term colleges is 1,647 RMB in 2008 (MyCos Institute, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013). We adopted the arithmetic average value of the first two wages as the wage for normal college graduates, which was 2,290 RMB.

  18. The WTO’s effect on China’s annual GDP growth was estimated at around 0.5% (Li, 2002; Zhai, 2002).

  19. The promotion of a provincial official heavily relies on his local economic performance.

  20. Several Asian countries, such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China), achieved high economic growth rate and became developed countries during the 1960s–1980s.

  21. The average annual pre-tax income for Chinese teachers in public universities is $720. It is only 1/10 of Canadian teachers who have the highest income of 28 countries in a survey (Altbach P.G. et al., 2012). Many Chinese teachers have to take on part-time jobs outside the university.

  22. Low-rent Housing Program is a housing plan for poor urban families in China.

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He, Y., Mai, Y. Higher Education Expansion in China and the ‘Ant Tribe’ Problem. High Educ Policy 28, 333–352 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2014.14

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