Vocational education plays an important role in nurturing talents across various categories, passing on outstanding techniques and promoting employment and business.

China's annual number of college graduates today exceeds 10 million, but job market demand is not always in-sync with the educational background of these fresh grads. Instead, vocational school and junior college alumni find it much easier to secure a job than their normal college peers. On the one hand, technical talents are popular with employers; on the other, young people are more reluctant to attend technical school.

To solve this problem, apart from the usual go-tos like higher wages and a better working environment, today, an emphasis on the importance of undergraduate vocational education prevails.

Xiong Bingqi (view.inews.qq.com): The reluctance on the part of Chinese universities to train professional technicians is to blame for the gap between university education and society's actual demand.

Not all students can fully adapt to the senior middle school curriculum. And those students who pass the college entrance examination with scores just beyond the admission line most likely won't grow into academic talents at university either.

In most developed countries, academic talents only account for 10 percent of college students, while the rest are trained to be vocational professionals. To guarantee most college graduates will swiftly land a job after graduation, the concept of vocational education must receive a thorough overhaul in colleges and universities. Colleges should also consider changing their curricula and improving the quality of vocational

education, producing as many highly qualified graduates as possible. When these graduates are well paid, and even become social high-flyers, naturally, more students will opt to take vocational courses in college.

Zhou Shu (www.hunantoday.cn): Under-graduate vocational edu-cation intends to serve high-end industries or fill high-end posts in various industries. These graduates are supposed to become top-notch professionals, capable of coping with the modern industrial environment.

Comparatively, vocational education in junior colleges or technical schools is designed to produce capable workers for certain posts or industries. Students are trained to duplicate specific practices or just to operate particular machinery. If they are familiar with their areas of expertise, they can perform well. Undergraduate students are required to do more complex work—innovative work, even. They must equip themselves with diversified and interdisciplinary knowledge, as they are often asked to work across different areas and levels. In a nutshell, vocational undergraduates must possess rich theoretical knowledge and develop a far more comprehensive network than their junior college or technical school peers.

Zhao E'nuo (People's Daily): Demand for technical talents is growing and with that, the importance of vocational education is on the rise. The problem now is that the latter is incapable of attracting enough students, resulting in a shortage of high-end technical talents.

To develop undergraduate vocational education will help ease this gap to large extent. Vocational education in undergraduate studies aims to nurture talents capable of combining research and development with production. Compared with junior college vocational education, it's more than extending schooling by one or two years; it's to give students more and systematic theoretical knowledge as well as cultivate their capabilities to innovate and tackle complex technical problems.

If undergraduate vocational education receives more public attention and injections of funds and resources, some students won't need to compete with others for the opportunities to attend ordinary universities. They can opt for technical education and in several years' time, high-level technicians capable of complex craft processing will find themselves very useful in the country's industrial upgrading and overall economic growth. Finding a job will be a piece of cake. 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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