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-Zhang Minxuan, Deputy Director, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission
In just a few months another round of college students will step out of the classroom and into the job market, a market which, in the midst of a global economic crisis, is looking anything but promising. More students than ever are about to start pounding the pavement for that first job, only to find fewer job openings available in China's job markets. Some say 2009 may have the gloomiest outlook yet for new college grads.
According to the 2009 blue paper on the economy released by The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a million college graduates, or 27-percent, were left jobless at the end of 2008. This year an estimated 6.1 million college students are expected to join them in the search for that first job. That’s more than 520 thousand than in '08.
Why China’s job market for the college grads comes to a bottleneck? What is the core solution to this problem?
Joining us as a guest today, Zhang Minxuan --- Deputy Director, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and Delegate of the CPPCC.
Zhang Minxuan started working at Shanghai Normal University in 1986 and earned his doctoral degree in Comparative Education from the University of Hong Kong in 2001. Now he is the deputy director, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, mainly responsible for Shanghai’s college recruitment and college graduate employment.
SH’s initiatives to boost employment
A: Professor Zhang, welcome to the Main Talk. It’s nice having you here.
Z: Yes, welcome.
A: Let’s talk about the number of students we are going to have here in Shanghai. 200 thousand students will be graduating and will be in the job market this year in Shanghai alone. That’s 160 thousand roughly locally, 50 thousand from other cities. How many of those students can we expect will not secure their job?
Z: This year is very special because of the hard financial time. So we face some challenges. Locally we’ve got more than 15 or 16 thousand students. And we think there will be other 50 thousand that will come to Shanghai to find their jobs. So we can say it is hard time.
A: A lot of those students are not going to secure their job, would you agree?
Z: Up to now, they’ll think about whether they can get job or not. So it’s not calm, compared with the other years. But the government already thinks about that. So when we met the financial crisis last November and December, the government began to do the work for them.
A: Let’s talk a little bit about that. The Shanghai government is taking steps to help these students and maybe entice them to do something they may not have done. Can you tell a little bit about the initiatives the government is taking for the students?
Z: 6 channels for the students. One is for the students to continue their study. Let some of the students with the associate degree go to the bachelor degree and encourage some students of bachelor degree to master degree. So in this way, maybe 30 thousand students will go on to their studies. So this is the first channel. The second channel will encourage the students to be teachers and doctors, because this year we are in the process of building the new countryside or new suburbs in Shanghai. So in the suburbs or in the countryside of Shanghai, we need many primary and secondary school teachers. So we’ve got nearly 2000, exactly we say 1800 primary and secondary school teachers. And also we find lots of jobs for the medical students as the doctors in the communities. And we will also build three very excellent hospitals in the suburbs and countryside. So some new doctors will be in that area. So we need 2000 doctors and nurses. So for the nursery and medical students, there is no problem. That is the second channel. The third channel is that we have a lot of government projects. We’ll encourage the students to be in the basic work unit, come to the west and come to the technical support for the rural constructions. For what we call the countryside officials, in Shanghai we have many local communities. I was told there are more than 3500 communities. So if every community got one student, we’ll have 3500. So this is a very large channel. And this is the third. The fourth, we found that some students now although they have lots of knowledge, they have no enough skills. We will create some opportunities for students to learn some skills. So we should practice their skills. The last new one is to have the internship. Up to now, internship is not very popular in China. But when we come to the other countries and other international organizations, there is lots of internship. So we should try to create 30 thousand internships. Because in next year we’ll have the world EXPO and there will be lots of volunteers and internship. So this is what we call the six channels.
Theoretically, the six government initiatives could help absorb 60,000 grads. But are there more active roles the remaining 150,000 in the city can take.
Z: And we can plus three others. The three others are self-employment, creating new business…
A: Yeah, talking on the new business because I think this is a very interesting one. The government wants more new graduates to look into being entrepreneurs. Do you think that’s going to happen? Because these are the students that just got out of college, that’s a lot to undertake.
Z: I don’t think lots of students will go, but anyhow there are some students that will go. Now the government didn’t say, “Oh we need a lot, 50% of the students to be self-employed.” We said maybe 5% or 3%, but it’s still okay, right? So when they go, they’ll organize a very small self-employed, or one or two small or medium business. We encourage them because in this way their knowledge, skills and innovations will be used in their job. Right? Of course they need a lot of help. Maybe they have patterns, but they don’t know how to register a firm, a company. How to do that? So in Shanghai we set up a foundation called the foundation of science technology and creation for the graduates. So this foundation has lots of volunteers, usually some successful businessmen. They give a lot of guidelines or say tutorial and coaching for the graduates and then they open their own business.
A: What kind of financial support can those students expect to get?
Z: It depends on their patterns and on their projects. The government will have the foundation to have the volunteers to take judge how much they need. So they got a part of loans and also give some financial support. We set up that foundation in 2005. So from that year we already began that. So up to now more than 2000 graduate companies already came.
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