BEIJING, March 2 (Xinhua) -- In the first week of the start of colleges and universities across the country in 2024, civil engineering majors are on the hot search. First, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics revoked the master's degree category of civil engineering and water conservancy, and then Tsinghua University refuted the rumors and stopped recruiting civil engineering majors and merged them into major majors.
Civil engineering, which was once hot, has gradually become a "sinkhole" major in people's mouths in recent years: in the past, "those with high scores entered", but now the enrollment is upset, and the "fragrant bait" in the eyes of parents in the past has now become the embarrassment of "running away with a bucket".
The huge contrast between civil engineering majors also reflects the embarrassment of the withdrawal of college majors.
Enrollment is cold, and students change careers after graduation?
In the 2023 high recruitment season, a candidate was admitted to the civil engineering major of Guangzhou University with a score of 453, causing an uproar on the Internet. Compared with previous years, the lowest score and lowest ranking of this major have dropped significantly.
The civil engineering profession has been cold, and it is no longer an isolated incident in recent years. According to the "2023 High Recruitment Survey Report" released by China Education**, the scores of civil engineering majors in most colleges and universities across the country have declined significantly, and the admission scores (rankings) have appeared to varying degrees**. Tongji University has more than 400 admissions in Shandong, China University of Geosciences (Beijing) has nearly 5,000 candidates in the case of unchanged total enrollment, and Sichuan University and Hunan University have 1069 and 2771 respectively.
The development of any industry has its cycle. In the past two or three years, the downturn in the property market has caused traditional civil engineering majors to fall into the puzzle of development solidification and cognitive bias. The staff of the Propaganda Department of Guangzhou University has responded that some parents and social figures have misunderstandings about the professional perception of the needs of the civil engineering industry, resulting in many information asymmetry problems in social and online publicity.
Yuan Feng, who is engaged in the operation of civil engineering self-leading communities, believes that the reason for this situation is that the information of the job market is slowly fed back to the voluntary application of universities. He said that in recent years, some civil engineering students have faced challenges in employment, and many students are reluctant to take the traditional career direction, and the proportion of changing careers after graduation is increasing.
Chen Xueqi, a recent graduate of Xiamen University majoring in civil engineering, is an example. He studied civil engineering for 7 years, and the most relevant job in his major was construction design, but because of his interest and industry reasons, he did not do related work. In a program, Zhang Xuefeng, a famous graduate school teacher, once called this behavior "climbing the pit".
Chen Xueqi revealed that when graduation is approaching, there are not many of their classmates who do professional work, either to do non-construction work in real estate companies, or to more stable state-owned enterprises and central enterprises, as well as public examinations, training, teachers, and so on.
And in the army of graduate school entrance examinations, the proportion of civil engineering students crossing the examination is also increasing. On the Internet, civil engineers use one word to describe this situation - "running away with a bucket".
Data map: Applicants learn about the information of the employer at the event site. Photo by Tong Yu.
Is it really a "sinkhole" professional?
It seems that all kinds of phenomena point to the fact that the civil engineering profession is becoming a "sinkhole" major. However, some people believe that this is only a phased phenomenon faced by the transformation and upgrading of traditional civil engineering majors.
Sixty years after I graduated, this is the third civil engineering crash, the first two being in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century. Therefore, there is no forever popular profession and industry, change is the biggest constant, we must promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional civil engineering to intelligence, digitalization and networking, and do our best to meet the challenge. Previously, Zhou Fulin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Guangzhou University, said so in an interview.
He believes that the most basic needs of human beings are "clothing, food, shelter and transportation", and civil engineering carries all its construction needs, which is an important profession needed by human beings and society, and it is also a profession with strong vitality in history. Therefore, civil engineering is not the morning sun nor the sunset, but should be "Changyang" and "Changyang".
In the past, in the real estate industry, everyone did not shy away from engineering posts, because the rise in engineering is relatively fast, and if it goes well, it can quickly be promoted from ordinary employees to project managers and project managers, which is also very tiring at that time, but the income is very high, so it covers up a lot of problems. Chen Xueqi believes that as the industry dividends fade, many problems are slowly exposed.
In Yuanfeng's view, now may be the adjustment time faced by civil engineering majors, "It was too popular before, there were too many colleges and universities that opened civil engineering majors, and there were more people recruited from all directions." By the end of 2019, nearly 600 undergraduate colleges and universities across the country had set up civil engineering majors, according to **.
Yuanfeng graduated from a 985 university with a civil engineering A+ discipline, he said that there have been such cases before, two students majoring in civil engineering at Tongji University, one with excellent grades in graduate school, and the other directly employed, but the graduate students found that they could not keep up with the rhythm of undergraduate students at all, because the latter experienced three years of rapid development of real estate.
Yuanfeng believes that with the change of market demand, the construction industry no longer needs so many students, which is reasonable for structural adjustment. But has the civil engineering profession really become a "sinkhole", he believes that it is impossible to simply draw conclusions.
Depending on your expectations, if a civil engineering student can still easily enter a good construction company and design institute, it is not difficult to find a job, but there must be a gap between the salary and development prospects compared with a few years ago, so the core is the change of expectations. At this time, students who graduate need to be mentally prepared. Yuan Feng said.
Data map: The participating students are testing the endurance of the model. Photo by Lu Ming.
Experts: Colleges and universities need to be more rational in setting up majors and improve their majors
Not only civil engineering majors, in recent years, a number of new majors have been established, and a number of majors that are not suitable for economic and social development have been eliminated. Majors such as Public Utilities Management, Information Management and Information Systems, Clothing and Apparel Design, Product Design, and Information and Computing Science have been withdrawn in recent years.
Hu Juan, deputy director of the Center for Education Development and Public Policy Research and professor of the School of Education at Chinese University, believes that the change of hot and cold majors is a very natural phenomenon, and the social division of labor is constantly changing, and the demand for talents is also changing. As the labor market becomes saturated, some professions are getting colder, and some professions, such as artificial intelligence, are getting hotter.
There are two main logics in the setting of majors in colleges and universities: one is the epistemological logic of knowledge development, and the other is the demand logic of the labor market. Both work at the same time, but with modern socio-economic impacts, the latter plays an increasing role. Hu Juan said that colleges and universities will also have "bounded rationality" when setting up majors, and when civil engineering majors are popular, many schools will expand their enrollment, and those that are not originally available will also be added, and parents and students are more likely to be affected by the current market.
Higher education satisfies the needs of society, not the desires of society. In her view, the education department should lay out and optimize the professional structure of colleges and universities from a higher level, and colleges and universities need to be more rational in the setting of majors, not fully embrace the market, and walk in front of parents and students as much as possible.
The civil engineering profession used to expand too fast, but now it has shrunk, and in the process, there is a group of people who are just catching up with the node of change and may face labor pains. Hu Juan believes that when students and parents apply for majors, they should not be led by the hot and cold of the moment, insist on their own interests, study more trends in economic and social development, and try to choose majors that are more in line with future development.
At the same time, Hu Juan believes that this further shows that higher education should not give students too strong professional education, but should be a kind of thinking education.
According to Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Education Sciences, there are certain flaws in the current way of setting up majors. On the one hand, it is not in line with the procedures and laws of human growth and development for students to enter a certain major when their advantages and potentials are unknown. On the other hand, the demand for jobs in society is changing, and the plan when entering school often cannot keep up with the changes when you graduate. In addition, the division of majors is too detailed, which leads to the narrow coverage of the knowledge that students learn in school, reduces the adaptability of employment, and also instrumentalizes people to a certain extent.
Chu Zhaohui said that many mainstream colleges and universities in the world do not set majors when students enroll, and adopt a standardized course selection system and credit system, so that students can find the direction of interest by themselves, in fact, the choice of study and employment is left to students themselves, thus greatly reducing the huge gap between the majors and employment needs.
It can be noted that in recent years, many domestic colleges and universities have also promoted enrollment reform and implemented large-category enrollment and large-category training. Chu Zhaohui believes that the standardized course selection system and credit system are the mainstream of global higher education development, which is more efficient, more suitable for students, and more suitable for market development. (Some names have been changed).
Reporter Yuan Xiuyue.