

China Faces a Grad Glut After Boom at Colleges - tokenadult
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087181303261033.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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potatolicious
This phenomenon is not unique to China. At the University of Waterloo here in
Canada, we've been building out "hot majors" exactly as the article describes:
hot-button buzzword-of-the-year degree programs that attract hopeful students
and then kick them into the pit of unemployability.

Case in point: the new nanotechnology program, which has a dismal employment
rate, and most of the employed students are cannibalizing existing chemical
engineering jobs.

And it continues this year with the introduction of "management engineering",
a concept that is still ill-defined and nebulous, and seems more like a grab
at tuition dollars than a genuine academic affair.

Disclaimer: I am in neither of these programs, I'm just sick of this
university and its profiteering ways, and how it has been run like a private
business as of late. Maybe we should try expanding the campus instead of
selling out our government-granted land to build a new office park (oh hey,
the article covered that too), or trying to out-buzzword ourselves by building
a campus in Dubai. Ugh.

This sort of academic gross mismanagement is global.

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biohacker42
A lot of countries, most of then developing countries, see the connection
between prosperity and a lot of advanced degrees and think correlation =
causation.

It's a lot easier to send bright kids to school, then it is to fix the
corruption and mismanagement that's keeping your country underdeveloped.

Canada might just be overenthusiastic ;)

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gaius
_Mr. Zhang got his degree from a school of traditional Chinese medicine with
no history of teaching computer sciences._

China, like Dubai, is going to learn the hard way that you can't compress
centuries of development into years, or even decades.

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indiejade
University was once akin to "finding one's place in the Universe." Yet it
seems like the more the pursuit of profit overlaps the goal of furthering
humanity, the more difficult it becomes for people who want to further
humanity (science, engineering, etc.) to do so.

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gaius
I don't know about that, the college I went to to get a degree in Mech Eng had
strong ties to industry and did lots of useful research. Most of the
professors had consulting gigs on the side; the chap that taught us
Thermodynamics & Turbomachinery was doing real jet engine design, the chap
that taught us about control systems was also working on real systems for
North Sea oil rigs.

It's only in the humanities and so-called soft sciences that academia's
disappeared up its own backside.

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ovi256
I got a "Page Unavailable" from the original URL [1]. On a hunch, I removed
the "?mod=googlenews_wsj" part, and lo and behold, it worked. Is WSJ blocking
GoogleNews links ? Or is this something much more mundane ?

    
    
      1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087181303261033.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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DougBTX
WFM, much more mundane I expect.

