Harsh but true? Chinese blogger hits a liberal arts nerve in a tough job market

Tan KW

Publish date: Tue, 23 Jan 2024, 02:23 PM

Chinese education blogger Zhang Xuefeng was direct and damning when a woman asked him during a livestream whether her son should choose to study liberal arts at university.

Zhang, who has more than 24 million followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is a regular source of advice for education and the job market.

“All liberal arts graduates are joining the service industries! And all they need is grovelling,” he said during the event last month.

To many viewers - and arts graduates and students - the comments were offensive - not just for the choice of language but for suggesting their degrees were worthless in today’s economy.

Zhang later apologised - only for thousands of liberal arts students to say the comments struck a chord with them.

In a highly competitive job market weighted heavily in favour of people with STEM skills, the blogger’s forthright assessment may have been harsh, but it wasn’t wrong, they said.

Academics and researchers say the controversy over the remarks reflects long-standing problems in Chinese higher education.

Liberal arts studies include humanities majors such as history and literature, social sciences such as economics, journalism and law, and some majors in business schools.

Zhang did not specify which liberal arts majors he was criticising, but the thousands of social media users who echoed his comments on social media platforms ranged from literature and journalism students to finance graduates.

An anthropology graduate from a leading university in Shanghai said his teachers told students at the beginning of the school year to be “mentally prepared” for not being able to find a job.

In 2023, some 11.58 million people graduated from China’s universities, 820,000 more than the previous year.

A survey by online recruitment firm Zhilian Zhaopin found that only 41.3% of humanities majors in the class of 2023 received a job offer before graduation, the lowest ranking among all five major categories. Business majors fared better, it was a lower percentage than engineering.

Zhilian Zhaopin’s report said: “Liberal arts graduates lack relevant skills and knowledge that meet market needs, so they have limited job opportunities and few employment options”.

Competition in the job market has led some students to turn to graduate school and the civil service, both of which also require highly competitive exams and have attracted millions of applicants in recent years.

But the Zhilian Zhaopin report showed that postgraduate studies for humanities and social science students are of limited help in finding a job.

Some of Zhang’s recommendations on education overlap with the priorities of Beijing, which seeks to outcompete the US on technological fronts and sees little use in supporting liberal arts majors, which faces heavier ideological control from Beijing.

President Xi Jinping has repeatedly called on China to further strengthen its STEM education, and a number of senior officials with STEM backgrounds have been appointed to key positions.

Xi said that China should “dynamically adjust and optimise higher education disciplines according to the development of science and technology”.

Among majors liberal arts students could choose, law and finance were once considered popular and its graduates easily employable. But the former has raised questions about its real employment rate after decades of expansion. And the financial sector has faced pay cuts under Beijing’s drive to exert more direct control by the Communist Party.

Yuan Changgeng, an anthropologist at Yunnan University, said liberal arts education has failed to provide students with “solid employment skills or academic abilities”.

“When they say that Zhang’s words are reasonable, they are not opposing a certain kind of knowledge, but rather examining the discrepancy between social reality and what liberal arts education claims to be,” Yuan said.

Students in humanities disciplines such as literature and anthropology have long known that employment would be difficult, Yuan added. But for practical disciplines such as law and journalism, “in the past, society didn’t think it was a bad subject for employment”.

A young lecturer who teaches constitutional law at a leading liberal arts university said her students were busy every day preparing for postgraduate and civil service exams. She worried that the pressure on students to find jobs would further squeeze the “independent thinking” that liberal arts was supposed to foster.

Xiong Bingqi, director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, said China’s universities needed to rethink “to improve the quality of university education”.

“Universities are expanding too fast without regard to the quality of education,” Xiong said. “Some local universities focus too much on postgraduate studies and may not provide students with a complete undergraduate education.”

An education researcher at a leading university in Beijing who requested anonymity said “the debate over the use of liberal arts is a global trend”.

But he said that in China’s liberal arts education, “core skills such as writing and critical thinking are not well trained”.

- SCMP

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