I read an article a few months ago stating that many college educated individuals in China are doing jobs that do not require college credentials in the US. These young graduates are living in tiny dorm like apartments and sharing them with many others, just to survive on the tiny wages they are paid.
China has some real disadvantages when it comes to higher education. During the 50's, 60's and 70's, China experienced an orgy of almost insane fanaticism that destroyed whatever weak and antiquated higher education the communists had inherited from the past. An entire generation of academics were humiliated, denounced as 'class-enemies', sent to labor camps and in many cases killed. Then China abruptly changed course in the years prior to 1980 and decided to emulate the West in a different way (in it's Mussolini-style state-fascist form). And China has been trying to re-create a university sector from essentially zero ever since, a university sector able to educate a population four times that of the US (and three times that of the EU). It needs to be a tame education sector of course, tightly controlled, one that doesn't question the Party and serves whatever the leadership defines as the national purpose. So China remains woefully underserved by higher education at this point. There are new universities being constructed everywhere, but the country doesn't really have a sufficient number of productive domestic scholars and academics available to staff them. China has had to send many of its best students abroad to study, and many of these choose not to return while others return 'corrupted' by Western ideas like individualism and democracy. China remains a giant experiment in national re-definition and national re-creation, and only time will tell what direction things finally take and what success it ultimately has.
Yea, that individualism and democracy, as well as fairness, equal opportunity, individual freedoms, free speech and all of that other evil stuff will just corrupt all those good communists.
