West is trounced by Chinese aspiration
By Jeremy Warner Economics Last updated: September 6th, 2010
Parents of freshmen sleep in a gym at a university in Wuhan province (Photo: EPA)
A picture tells a thousand words, and there are few more telling, or poignant, than this one, which shows parents who have travelled with their children to enroll for university in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, bedding down for the night in a campus gymn made available to those who cannot afford hotel accommodation.
It is impossible to imagine this happening in the UK, or indeed any other advanced economy, where many parents don’t bother to accompany their children to university at all, and to me is another worrying sign of the growing gulf in ambition that separates the aspiring developing world from the tired old, “advanced economies”. To the developing world, the future looks bright. In China, and most other developing countries, going to university offers a route to a better future in the West, we’ve lost our belief in self improvement and seem already resigned to a future of gentle, or even catastrophic decline.
For China, expansion of tertiary education forms a key part of the country’s development strategy. The number of graduate and undergraduate students in China has approximately quadrupled in recent years. In 1998, the total number of graduates from tertiary education was 0.8 million; in 2005, it was more than 3 million, a nearly threefold increase. The number of enrolments (of new and total students) has risen even faster and approximately quintupled between 1998 and 2005.
Since then, the numbers have continued to rise at an almost exponential rate. What’s more, the focus is strongly on the sciences. There are already substantially more Ph.D. engineers and scientists in China than in the United States, as China produces three times the number of engineers per year. You can argue about the quality of some of these graduates, but what China may lose in terms of the standard of qualification, it makes up for in quantity, and even on the standards it is catching up fast.
China is also increasingly dominant in terms of foreign undergraduates studying abroad. Attending a graduation ceremony for my son at Manchester University this summer, I was astonished by the numbers of Chinese. This perhaps told you as much about the seriousness with which the Chinese take their studies and the prize of an eventual degree as their numbers. Again many UK students don’t bother to turn up for the graduation ceremony. To them, a degree is nothing special.
To me, this picture is both an inspiration and a cause for alarm, for it vividly illustrates how the West’s monopoly on knowledge, the biggest source of its relative wealth, is likely to be eroded over the next decade. In an interview for today’s Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair accuses the Coalition of being soft on crime and suggests that Britain has much to learn from the developing world, where criminality is not tolerated. He might with the same breath have mentioned education.
