Our higher education is like caviar: a luxury to both students and employers.

College degrees are no longer tickets to jobs, the highly paid ones in particular. Students stress over careers and salaries after college. Many of them are paid less for their entry-level jobs than migrant workers.

Such a situation has put a wet blanket over the interest of many young people - especially those in the countryside - in higher education.

Many rural families spend all their money preparing one promising child for the college entrance examinations. Other children have to work to help the parents make ends meet. The one who can go to college is expected to find a good career and lift his or her parents and siblings out of poverty. However, college credentials no longer guarantee success.

It is sensible for rural Chinese parents to ask their children to make career-based decisions when choosing colleges and majors. They have every reason to stop investing in their children's college education if they decide it is a waste of money. Especially as many factories in the country's coastal areas are now short of hands after migrant workers returned to their hometowns for the Chinese Lunar New Year in February.

It is not difficult to see what is missing in the nation's education: vocational training that can produce a pool of skilled labor.

Rural areas are an important pool of cheap labor for the nation's industrial development. But most of the farmers-turned workers are poorly educated and have no skills.

A study by the US-based economics consultancy IHS Global Insight released on Monday showed that we have superseded the United States as the world's top manufacturing country by output. It is the country's large manufacturing sector that is the destination for most rural jobseekers.

But they are not ready. As the nation's manufacturing industry becomes increasingly sophisticated, skilled workers are badly needed. Senior technicians make up less than 4 percent of the workforce in China while in developed countries it is as much as 40 percent.

Vocational education needs to be made more affordable and available for rural children so as to sharpen their competitive edge in the labor market. It means that they have places to equip themselves with skills if they don't go to college.

Vocational education will build an affluent, skilled labor pool for the nation's future economic development.

Gong Liqun, vice-mayor of Zhengzhou, Henan province and a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee, recommended that vocational training be written into the nation's education system.

We hope that this proposal doesn't fall on deaf ears.

(China Daily 03/17/2011 page8)