World Students’ Day: Preparing Chinese students for the future

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Editor's note: Wang Yan is a senior specialist at the National Institute of Educational Sciences. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In 1946, student representatives from all over the world held a student conference in Prague, and announced November 17 of each year as the "International Students' Day" to strengthen the unity and friendship of college students around the world.

The festival was established to advocate for peace, democracy, freedom and progress among college students.

Over the years, it has evolved into a festival for students around the world to express their best wishes for the future and celebrate youth and hope associated with university life.

One fifth of the world's college student population lives in China. The number of college students in China amounted to 35.6 million in 2017 (approximately 43 million including those enrolled in online programs), the largest number in the world.

An on-campus job fair held at Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, November 17, 2018. /VCG Photo

Compared to the 117,000 college and university students when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, this is tremendous progress in almost seven decades

Each year, millions of college graduates enter the labor market and with their talent, become a leading force in rapid social and economic development.

University students are expected to play an increasingly important role in China's development and prosperity. As long as the young generation has aspiration, abilities and responsibilities, a country will have prospects, and a nation will have hope.

Stakeholders in education are concerned that Chinese students' innovation and entrepreneurship abilities need to be improved, especially to meet the demand for the nation's transition from a labor-intensive to technology-intensive economy.

In a globalized world, Chinese students, like their international peers, will work in a more culturally diverse workplace. The result of a Global Talent Survey shows that today's businesses value the ability to work with clients and businesses from different cultures, multicultural experience as well as knowledge of more than one language.

Furthermore, many Chinese college students are now the only children in their family, living with superior material conditions. Some people say that college students who have grown up in such an environment lack competitive awareness and their ability to solve problems are not as good as their peers abroad.

To address these challenges, the Chinese government has been committed to system-wise improvement for educating better talent, with an array of policy reforms, ranging from upgrading student learning assessments to restructuring undergraduate education.

To address the issue of rote learning for college entrance examinations, which reportedly undermines students' ability to innovate, the examination is being reformed to allow students to choose their preferred subjects and university admissions will also incorporate students' overall capabilities on top of their written examination.

International students from Anhui University are learning papercutting in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, July 22, 2018. /VCG Photo

Chinese higher education was once seen as having a tough enrollment process, but an easier path to graduation, meaning after students enter college through very competitive examination, they face a more relaxed learning life with less demanding evaluations, compared to other education systems in the world.

This has been changed with a new round of reforms that emphasize the quality of undergraduate education and direct leadership, teachers, students and resources for quality learning with much stricter quality control over learning results.

To enable students to face the future competition on the international stage, the Chinese government has also been committed to developing world-class universities and world-class programs (Double World Class Initiative), a new national strategy to improve international higher education competitiveness.

While international student mobility has become a norm in higher education, an increasing number of Chinese students went abroad for undergraduate or postgraduate degrees.

In 2017, over 600,000 Chinese studied in different countries. Statistics show that from 1978 to 2017, 83.73 percent of international students from China chose employment back at home.

An international culture festival held at Wuhan University, China, November 9, 2018. /VCG Photo

Meanwhile, more and more students from other countries choose China as their preferred destination for further study. In 2016, there were 440,000 international students in China, 47.3 percent studying for degree-oriented programs.

Such mobility facilitated students' knowledge and skills in multicultural settings, improved employability in increasingly globalized labor markets, including expanding their knowledge of other societies and improving language skills.

Together with other international exchange and cooperation activities that take place on Chinese university campuses, hopefully it'll help achieve aims of equal communication and cooperation between university students and people from different cultural backgrounds.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)