Graduate Education’s Trying Times.docVIP

Graduate Education?s Trying Times As more and more people in China attend graduate schools, experts are raising questions about the quality of the education students receive, and some view the outlook as relatively bleak unless major changes are made. At the National Association for the Study of Higher Education?s 2005 annual meeting in November at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Xuhui campus), a task force led by Yang Jie, Vice Director of the Institute of Higher Education at the university, released a report analyzing the teaching, research and social services quality of 71 graduate schools directly under the Ministry of Education. The report found that the quality of graduate education at China?s key universities is fairly low, and described the future of higher education in the country as “vague.” “The question of graduate education today becomes more serious and it?s time for concerned departments and institutions to pay enough attention to such a problem,” Yang said.省略, the pace of enrollment grew steadily from 2000 to 2004, with the rate of increase among doctoral students averaging 19.5 percent a year, and the number of master?s degree candidates rising 23.1 percent. The burden on professors has also been increasing rapidly. While the number of undergraduate students per professor rose 28.6 percent from 2000 to 2004, that ratio doubled for graduate students. On average, each professor advised an average of 7.7 master?s degree students in 2004, compared to 3.8 students in 2000.省略 showed. Lu Wenbin, an associate professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Beijing Language and Culture University, said, “Today’s graduate education has embarked on a different path from the past. Not only students and supervisors, but also training methods, have fallen into a troublesome situation.” Decline in student quality JOB HUNT: Students at the University of International Business and Economics are enthusiastic in looking for part-ti