China’s Ministry of Education is considering eliminating popular undergraduate majors in law and business, according to an article in the Beijing Morning Post ( available here and titled 部分本科专业酝酿取消).
Beijing Normal University and Xiamen University presidents are among those urging that law and management majors be removed from the MOE’s catalog of undergraduate majors, according to the article. Reportedly these suggestions have “directly influenced” MOE deliberations.
The proffered rationales include that students are too young and inexperienced for these subjects and that they won’t have immediate practical application for them (meaning in part that students in these majors are having trouble finding jobs).
Chen Zhunmin, president of the University of International Business and Economics, laments that many of UIBE’s undergraduate management majors are having trouble finding employment. He also cites human resources management as an example of an inappropriate undergraduate major, noting some of these students cannot yet manage themselves, much less be useful as HR managers to enterprises.
Students in any undergraduate major (and many graduate ones) are not usually expected to be advanced practitioners in their field immediately upon graduation. Rather, they are supposed to develop overall (intellectually and emotionally), learn some basics of an area and then probably start as subordinate trainees (in HR departments or elsewhere), so I don’t understand President Chen’s point. More generally, I think it will be a shame if China eliminates majors in areas where it needs more people using an old-school centrally planned approach.
Xiamen’s president Zhu Chongshi argues that masters programs in law are the right path for training legal professionals, not undergraduate law majors. He says undergraduates should take courses in law but not a major in law. He notes many graduate programs in the US (law for example, though the reference is not explicit) do not have undergraduate counterparts.
I attended a small liberal arts college and majored in history before, some years later, going to law school, so I know that a broad undergraduate education is helpful for many students (including those of us who go on to graduate training in law). But note the argument is not against premature specialization at the undergraduate level in general. It’s just against these specific undergraduate majors. I doubt the MOE really wants PRC undergraduate to pursue a liberal arts curriculum. That would, er, tend to liberate their thinking, which isn’t, politically, a goal of PRC education. Also, China is committed to training legions of technical professionals.
Also, in a country with such a nascent legal profession it strikes me as a radically bad idea to make focused legal study available only for graduate degrees. That is the current US pattern, but it is not the model in most civil law countries (of which China is one). China needs more lawyers fast, so letting undergraduates train in law makes sense.
I’d also observe that this policy discussion should be a reminder to all foreign educational institutions considering expansion in China that China is not their familiar environment. Just as PRC education isn’t based on the fundamental assumptions of academic freedom central to the Western higher education enterprise, it is also not a polyglot structure like American higher education with a rich mixture of public, private and even for-profit institutions overseen by myriad NGO accrediting agencies (and other players). The central government’s role is vastly bigger in China. Imagine this scenario: a US university has invested in developing undergraduate law and management majors in China. The policy under discussion could wipe out such programs!
As I read the article I wondered how much experience the university presidents and MOE cadres considering these changes themselves have in law and business management. Nearly all of them matured in a centrally planned, less pluralistic era in China—just the kind of time when bureaucratic fiat decided who could study what. That background seems to continue shaping their outlooks.
The president of Beijing Normal University Zhong Binglin is identified as among those urging that the MOE’s catalog of undergraduate majors be modified to eliminate law and management, but in a sidebar to the article he is also quoted as arguing that higher ed institutions should have autonomy to establish and eliminate majors on their own—that the MOE should only provide guidance. I certainly agree with him about that; PRC higher ed institutions should have independence. If they do, they will offer different programs. That will give educational consumers choice; competition will then yield innovation and overall better results for China than MOE diktat.
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