Today my wife let me read her MSN profile. In her profile, she wrote that she wishes to find someone who can enjoy "Castle in the sky" and "Shaun of the Dead", and someone who is as cute as Do la A Meng (a little robotic cat in a Japanese cartoon).
Her profile is about me.
I feel lucky that I could share my life with someone who could and would connect with me spiritually. She and I have a lot in common. Often times we feel happy for the same causes, and angry for the same reasons. We sometimes end up being mad at each other simultaneously, because she's probably having the same feeling that I have. In a sense, it's easy to make her happy, because I feel happy the same way too.
I wish that wife and I could share a same ideal, and a same perspective of what a good and enjoyable life journey is. I am a person who could be easily be touched emotionally, and I am happy about it because I am feeling life. Isn't life is about being touched and touching others' hearts?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Study What You Like
My undergraduate training was received in China. Back in my day, we have a unified college entrance exam, held once a year. Your test score from that exam determines what school you will be admitted to, and possibly what you will study for four years that largely defines your career.
Although I have left China for nearly 10 years, I don't think the situation is fundamentally changed. When a high school student apply for college, he/she chooses what to study not necessarily based on what they like, but mostly on what they can get in. On the university side, each department enrolls a fix number of students, based on a centralized plan, which are somewhat disconnected from the job market. If you have good scores from the test, you are lucky to get into those "popular" programs such as computer science, electrical engineering or finance. If you are less lucky, you will be "allocated" to "less popular" departments, such as natural sciences or literature.
There are two major problems for this model. Firstly, students who are forced to study what they don't like, are highly unmotivated. Therefore they are most unlikely to benefit effectively from the training in that area. At the end of the four years, they find themselves wasting valuable time. Since those unpopular departments often time take in more students than the market actually needs, their graduates have trouble finding jobs.
Secondly, since only the highest scorers can get into "popular programs", the number of graduates from these programs is under-supply. Therefore, these programs remain artificially "popular", because of the subsidy from this particular enrollment system. This might be a good news for students in those disciplines, but not so much for the overall economy. The supply of labor from these disciplines is artificially limited, making the labor cost in those industries higher than what the nation can potentially offer. The students who are forced to study the "unpopular programs" are fully capable of studying the "popular programs" and become a potential competitor in those areas. But the reality is that, those graduates from the unpopular programs suffer from artificially low wages because of the oversupply of graduates than what these areas can consume. Since the wages in the "unpopular" programs remain low, the program remains "unpopular".
At the core of this very problem, is that the number of students enrolled in each majors does not reflect what the market actually needs. I am not saying the main job of universities is to provide vocational training to their students. But let's face the fact that universities are the major source for new labor into the market. If students are provided freedom to choose what they like to study, based on their perceived views of the future job markets, the situation will change: more people can study the now "popular programs", such as computer science, therefore the wage for a computer engineer will decrease, lowering the cost for the industry, and popularity of computer science will gradually reduce because of the lower wages and higher competition; less students will choose to study the now "unpopular programs", therefore the wages in these area go up, making them more attractive. It's more efficient to let the job market decides how many students should be taken into each academic programs.
By letting students to freely choose what they study for higher learning, the income gap between different majors will narrow down. The perceived images of various disciplines will therefore be changed to a more realistic way. Technically, there are no majors intrinsically less popular than the others. But there are definitely some majors need more labor than others, based on the particular economic structure of the country and the nature of each jobs. Simple example is, an economy tends to need more computer engineers than physicists, because computer science are applicable to more areas in the real life. That doesn't and shouldn't mean computer scientists are more valuable than physicists. It only means the current market needs more computer science professionals than physicists. If you force more people to study physics than the market actually needs, the supply pattern is distorted.
Of course, for students to make the right decisions about what to study, accurate and realistic data for salaries and number of job openings should be available frequently. Students should also be allowed to change their major at least once in college, because the job market is dynamic, and we might not make the right decision in the first place.
Although I have left China for nearly 10 years, I don't think the situation is fundamentally changed. When a high school student apply for college, he/she chooses what to study not necessarily based on what they like, but mostly on what they can get in. On the university side, each department enrolls a fix number of students, based on a centralized plan, which are somewhat disconnected from the job market. If you have good scores from the test, you are lucky to get into those "popular" programs such as computer science, electrical engineering or finance. If you are less lucky, you will be "allocated" to "less popular" departments, such as natural sciences or literature.
There are two major problems for this model. Firstly, students who are forced to study what they don't like, are highly unmotivated. Therefore they are most unlikely to benefit effectively from the training in that area. At the end of the four years, they find themselves wasting valuable time. Since those unpopular departments often time take in more students than the market actually needs, their graduates have trouble finding jobs.
Secondly, since only the highest scorers can get into "popular programs", the number of graduates from these programs is under-supply. Therefore, these programs remain artificially "popular", because of the subsidy from this particular enrollment system. This might be a good news for students in those disciplines, but not so much for the overall economy. The supply of labor from these disciplines is artificially limited, making the labor cost in those industries higher than what the nation can potentially offer. The students who are forced to study the "unpopular programs" are fully capable of studying the "popular programs" and become a potential competitor in those areas. But the reality is that, those graduates from the unpopular programs suffer from artificially low wages because of the oversupply of graduates than what these areas can consume. Since the wages in the "unpopular" programs remain low, the program remains "unpopular".
At the core of this very problem, is that the number of students enrolled in each majors does not reflect what the market actually needs. I am not saying the main job of universities is to provide vocational training to their students. But let's face the fact that universities are the major source for new labor into the market. If students are provided freedom to choose what they like to study, based on their perceived views of the future job markets, the situation will change: more people can study the now "popular programs", such as computer science, therefore the wage for a computer engineer will decrease, lowering the cost for the industry, and popularity of computer science will gradually reduce because of the lower wages and higher competition; less students will choose to study the now "unpopular programs", therefore the wages in these area go up, making them more attractive. It's more efficient to let the job market decides how many students should be taken into each academic programs.
By letting students to freely choose what they study for higher learning, the income gap between different majors will narrow down. The perceived images of various disciplines will therefore be changed to a more realistic way. Technically, there are no majors intrinsically less popular than the others. But there are definitely some majors need more labor than others, based on the particular economic structure of the country and the nature of each jobs. Simple example is, an economy tends to need more computer engineers than physicists, because computer science are applicable to more areas in the real life. That doesn't and shouldn't mean computer scientists are more valuable than physicists. It only means the current market needs more computer science professionals than physicists. If you force more people to study physics than the market actually needs, the supply pattern is distorted.
Of course, for students to make the right decisions about what to study, accurate and realistic data for salaries and number of job openings should be available frequently. Students should also be allowed to change their major at least once in college, because the job market is dynamic, and we might not make the right decision in the first place.
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