雅思写作范文：Not-So-Great Expectations
http://www.yinghuaedu.com 来源：英华教育（青岛）语言中心 发布时间：2012-09-12 14:20:13
Huang Lu knew it wouldn't be easy to find a job when she graduated from college last month. But when the ...
Huang Lu knew it wouldn't be easy to find a job when she graduated from college last month. But when the 21-year-old from Anhui province in southeastern China started going to employment fairs and sending out résumés seven months ago, she didn't expect the job market would be quite so inhospitable. "I've had eight interviews so far," says Huang, an international-trade graduate of Anhui University of Finance & Economics, "but I still don't have a decent offer. And I just had an export-import company in Shanghai cancel an interview. They told me, 'We're not hiring anymore, our business is down and we think it's going to get worse.'"
For China's class of 2008, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Throughout their college days, they have watched their nation's economy make double-digit annual growth seem routine. China has added nearly 11 million new jobs a year since 2004 (in contrast, the U.S. added about 1 million jobs last year), and in a culture in which the only thing revered more than education is making money, the former is supposed to lead directly to the latter. Just six months ago, to be young, educated and Chinese was to be in the global economy's sweet spot. But even though China is celebrating its international coming-out party this year by hosting the Olympics, for Huang and many of her classmates, any "I'm going to inherit the earth" optimism has been shelved. "Now," she says, idly text-messaging a friend from a Shanghai coffee shop, "I sometimes wonder whether I'll be able to get a job at all.''
Huang and her fellow graduates are facing China's surprisingly grim economic realities —some new, some chronic. Generating enough jobs for the masses of newly minted capitalists who emerge from China's university system has for years been a challenge. Last year, about one-third of college grads went jobless for at least six months after graduation, according to government estimates. This year's crop of 5.6 million grads —740,000 more than last year —is the largest ever, and the tsunami of able bodies is washing into the market just as China's economy is faltering.
Due in part to a falloff in demand from the ailing U.S., China's export growth is slowing sharply. Manufacturing contracted in July for the first time since at least 2005, according to China's Purchasing Managers' Index, resulting in reduced hiring by the sector. Meanwhile, a 50% drop in China's stock markets from their peak last October is creating a reverse wealth effect, some economists believe, leading both consumers and companies to be more cautious about their outlays. Tao Wang, an economist with Bank of America in Beijing, says China's GDP growth will slow to 10% this year, down from 11.4% in 2007, and could drop to 8.8% in 2008.
While those numbers may seem high to the developed world, to China they represent a sharp deceleration that is already being reflected in the labor market. In 2006, Guangdong province created 2 million new jobs. Last year, Zhang Xiang, a provincial-government spokesman, said that figure was likely to be closer to 1 million. One sign of the times: the province is in the process of overhauling its unemployment-compensation system to better protect workers against sudden layoffs. Officially, China's unemployment rate is a relatively healthy 4.2%, but government statistics are dodgy, in part because significant numbers of China's millions of migrant workers go uncounted. The slowdown is a cause for national, not just provincial, concern. In early July, the country's state council huddled with top economic policymakers in an emergency session to discuss options for rekindling growth. Officials in Beijing "are very concerned, much more so than they were even just a month ago," says one government economic adviser who was briefed on the sessions. "Containing inflation is no longer the primary focus of the government. Rightly or wrongly, they're thinking inflation is yesterday's problem. Growth —and jobs —is what they are concerned about."
China's job-market woes won't be solved by high economic growth alone. There are persistent problems within China's higher-education system that are of mounting concern. As children from the country's expanding middle class come of age, universities are being blitzed with new students. In fields such as engineering and economics, there simply aren't enough high-caliber teachers to go around. "China lacks the educational infrastructure to keep pace with the frantic demand for education," says Tang Min, chief China economist at the Asian Development Bank. A human-resources executive who helped produce a report on the subject for the American Chamber of Commerce in China puts it more bluntly: "the vast majority of [Chinese] kids go to second- or third-rate schools —diploma mills —and are just unprepared to enter a very competitive job market. They're getting ripped off."
The poor quality of Chinese schools is not a state secret. Consider what happened last year at the Hefei Artillery Academy in Anhui province, a school started decades ago by the People's Liberation Army to train young military cadets in the art of war. Five years ago, the school began accepting civilian students, offering undergraduate degrees in business, accounting and economics, among other subjects. But in November, civilian students learned that the degrees they were paying for were not recognized by Beijing's Ministry of Education. Chinese employers typically will not even interview students from unaccredited universities. When word got out, outraged students went on a rampage, setting furniture on fire and trashing classrooms. According to an eyewitness, riot police had to be called in to restore order.
No one would confuse Hefei Artillery Academy with Peking or Tsinghua universities, the Harvard and MIT of China. Yet parents had to pay about $1,250 in annual tuition plus a $5,400 "special fee" just to get their child into the academy. In a poor province like Anhui, that's serious money. Nor was the incident in Hefei isolated. Over the past two years, students attending at least four other colleges across China have rioted, claiming to have been misled about the degrees they were supposed to receive.
Employers say the incidents illustrate two broader problems in China's higher-education system. Education is such a bedrock value that "kids who really shouldn't even be in college go anyway, and then expect a good-paying job when they graduate," says the human-resources executive. Two years ago, the central government implicitly acknowledged this problem when it announced a plan to increase the number and quality of vocational schools throughout the country, hoping to siphon off some of the kids going to universities while still providing them with decent job opportunities. Employers say it's too early to say whether the program has been effective. He Lingyan, who runs a fast-growing industrial pipe –manufacturing company in Zhejiang province, says that when he needs engineers, "I look for people who have already worked. A lot of colleges aren't producing kids with the skills we need. There needs to be better communication between companies and educational institutions, and it will take time to fix this problem.''
Time is something that Xi Junling has a lot of these days. The 21-year-old graduated last month with an accounting degree from the Shanxi Construction Engineering Institute of Technology in central China. In the four months she has looked for a job, she has had one offer: ad-agency secretary, which paid $234 per month. As Xi knows well, there are migrant construction workers who earn more than that. She turned the job down, then had second thoughts. "It's been harder than I expected to get a job, so I called them back. But it had been filled." What does she plan to do now? With a hint of sarcasm, she says: "I'll do what every other college graduate with a lot of free time in China will do this summer: watch the Olympics."
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