No Degrees Necessary; China expands its vocational training to narrow the economic divide.

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China is turning to vocational training as a means of prolonging its economic ascendancy and quelling unrest. It's an urgent priority, given that recent college graduates can't find jobs and the lack of educational opportunities in the countryside is stoking rural unrest. Last month the All-China Federation of Trade Unions announced a "small business-credit plan for nationwide workers," which will provide $125 million in loans to help some 250,000 laid-off workers get additional vocational training in order to find new jobs. Similarly, the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Party of China endorsed a development blueprint to create a "new socialist countryside," including higher subsidies to farmers for training in modern agricultural methods.

The appeal of vocational schools is growing partly in response to the growing realization that a Chinese university degree can be a ticket to nowhere. When China's schools reopened after the Cultural Revolution, there weren't enough universities to accommodate a generation of disenfranchised scholars. Now the opposite is true. In the last seven years the number of Chinese college graduates has quintupled, reaching 4.1 million this year. But the National Development and Reform Commission reports that at least 60 percent of these graduates can't find work.

In contrast, vocational schools are popular because students learn real skills, from plumbing to nursing, that can be applied outside the classroom. When Li Xiangdong graduated from high school last year, he defied his parents' wish that he find a job, and enrolled in a vocational school near his home in southwestern Beijing offering classes in Leisure Sports Service and Management in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. "Now I know I will have the training to find a better job when I graduate," he says. "I will be able to assist my family and improve my future."

And while urban universities draw the best and the brightest from the countryside--worsening a vast urban-rural divide--most of China's more than 17,000 vocational schools are located in small villages. "Vocational training can help improve the standard of living of an entire community," says Peng Peigen, an architecture professor at Qinghua University. Peng's China First Joint Venture Architecture Firm endowed a vocational school in China's southern Yunnan province last year to train what he calls "barefoot architects" to take energy-efficient building methods to farm regions. And to make a better living for themselves.