Apparently China has instituted its own gainful employment rule.
According to a report by Xinhua News, the press agency of the People’s Republic of China:
A recent decision by China’s education administration to phase out college majors with a bleak employment outlook has experts saying that it will lead to a “utilitarian tendency” in college education. Efforts should be made to adapt the majors to the country’s development and the universities’ own development plans, rather than to the students’ employment outlook, the Tuesday edition of the People’s Daily newspaper quoted Li Zhenyu, the student admissions office director of Tianjin University, as saying.
The Ministry of Education announced last month that enrollment quotas for majors that see a post-graduation employment rate of less than 60 percent for two consecutive years will be reduced until the majors are phased out completely.
Li said that he believed it did make sense to use the employment-oriented policy to control the country’s vocational schools.
Note that this gainful employment rule is dramatically different from the American effort to regulate its for-profit schools based on the ability of graduates to pay of education debt. No Chinese graduates have student loans; all education is funded by the government.
