China News Service, Beijing, March 2 (Reporter Yuan Xiuyue) In the first week of the opening of colleges and universities across the country in 2024, the civil engineering major was on the hot search list.
First, Beihang University canceled the civil engineering and water conservancy master's degree category, and then Tsinghua University refuted rumors that it would stop recruiting civil engineering majors and merge them into major majors.
Civil engineering, which was once a hot topic, has gradually become what people call a "sinkhole" major in recent years: in the past, "those with the highest scores entered", but now the enrollment is very popular, and what used to be a "hot cake" in the eyes of parents has now become a "bucket run" The embarrassment of "road".
The huge contrast between civil engineering majors also reflects the embarrassing situation of the dismantling of majors in colleges and universities.
Data map: Photo by Yu Dongshan
Enrollment is sluggish, will students change careers immediately after graduation?
In the 2023 National College Entrance Examination season, a candidate failed to get 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 scores and lowest rankings in this major have declined significantly.
It is no longer an isolated incident in recent years that the civil engineering profession has experienced a cold spell.
According to the "2023 High Recruitment Survey Report" released by China Education Online, scores for civil engineering majors in most colleges and universities across the country have experienced a significant decline, and admission scores (rankings) have declined to varying degrees.
Tongji University's admission ranking in Shandong fell by more than 400 places. China University of Geosciences (Beijing)'s admission ranking fell by nearly 5,000 places while the total enrollment remained unchanged. Sichuan University and Hunan University fell by nearly 5,000 places. 1069 and 2771 positions.
"The development of any industry has its own cycle. The downturn in the property market in the past two or three years has caused traditional civil engineering majors to fall into a trap of fixed development and cognitive bias." Staff from the Propaganda Department of Guangzhou University once responded that some parents and social figures There are misunderstandings in the professional understanding of the needs of the civil engineering industry, which has led to many information asymmetry problems in society and online publicity.
Yuan Feng, who is engaged in civil engineering self-media community operation, believes that the reason why this situation occurs is that information from the job market is slowly fed back to university applications.
He said that in recent years, some students majoring in civil engineering have faced challenges in finding employment. Many students are reluctant to follow traditional career paths, and the proportion of people changing careers immediately after graduation is increasing.
Chen Xueqi, a recent master's degree graduate from Xiamen University majoring in civil engineering, is an example.
He studied civil engineering for 7 years, and the most relevant job for his major was construction design. However, due to his interest and industry reasons, he did not do related work. After doing consulting internships in real estate, he signed a contract with a major Internet company. channel sales positions.
In a program, Zhang Xuefeng, a famous postgraduate entrance examination teacher, once called this behavior "climbing into the pit."
Chen Xueqi revealed that as graduation approaches, not many of his classmates are doing jobs in this major. They either go to real estate companies to do non-construction jobs, or go to relatively stable state-owned enterprises and central enterprises, as well as take public exams, do training, work as teachers, etc. wait.
In the midst of the postgraduate entrance exams, the proportion of civil engineering students taking the postgraduate entrance exams is also increasing.
On the Internet, civil servants used one word to describe this situation - "running away with a bucket".
Data map: Applicants learn employer information at the event.
Photo by Tong Yu
Have you really become a "tiankeng" professional?
It seems that all phenomena point to the fact that the civil engineering major is becoming a "sinkhole" major.
However, some people believe that this is just a phased phenomenon faced by the transformation and upgrading of traditional civil engineering majors.
"It has been 60 years since I graduated. This is the third time that civil engineering has experienced major downturns. The first two were in the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, there is no forever popular major or industry, and change is the biggest constant. We To promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional civil engineering to intelligence, digitalization and networking, only by doing yourself well can you meet the challenges." Previously, Zhou Fulin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of Guangzhou University, said in an interview.
He believes that the most basic needs of human beings are "food, clothing, housing and transportation", and civil engineering carries all its construction needs. It is an important profession needed by humans and society, and it is also a profession with strong vitality in history.
Therefore, civil engineering is neither the rising sun nor the setting sun, but should be the "eternal sun" and "everlasting sun".
“In the past, in the real estate industry, people did not avoid engineering positions, because engineering jobs lead to a faster rise. If everything goes well, you can quickly rise from an ordinary employee to a project manager or project director. It was very tiring at that time, but the income was very high, so I covered it up. A lot of problems have arisen." Chen Xueqi believes that as the industry's dividends fade, many problems are slowly being exposed.
In Yuan Feng's view, now may be the time for adjustment for the civil engineering major. "It was too popular before. There were too many colleges offering civil engineering majors, and more people were recruited from all directions."
According to media reports, by the end of 2019, nearly 600 undergraduate colleges and universities across the country had established civil engineering majors.
Yuan Feng graduated from a 985 university with an A+ discipline in civil engineering. He said that there had been such a case before. Two students majoring in civil engineering at Tongji University, one with excellent grades, was admitted to graduate school, and the other was directly employed. As a result, the graduate student found that he had nothing to do with the graduate school. I can't keep up with my undergraduate classmates, because the latter have experienced three years of rapid development in real estate.
Yuanfeng believes that with changes in market demand, the construction industry no longer needs so many students, which is reasonable for structural adjustment.
But whether the civil engineering major has really become a "sinkhole", he believes that we cannot simply draw a conclusion.
"It depends on your expectations. If you are a civil engineering student in 211 or 985, it will be easier for you to enter a good construction unit and design institute. It is not difficult to find a job, but the salary and development prospects are much lower than a few years ago. There is definitely a gap, so the core is the change in expectations. Students graduating at this time need to be mentally prepared." Yuan Feng said.
Data map: Students participating in the competition are testing the endurance of the model.
Photo by Lu Ming
Expert: Colleges and universities need to be more rational in their professional settings and improve their professional settings
Not only the civil engineering majors, in recent years, a number of new majors have been continuously established, and a number of majors that are not suitable for economic and social development have been eliminated.
Majors such as public utility management, information management and information systems, clothing and apparel design, product design, and information and computing science have seen a larger number of withdrawals in recent years.
Hu Juan, deputy director of the Education Development and Public Policy Research Center of Renmin University of China and a professor at the School of Education, believes that changes in majors are a very natural phenomenon. The social division of labor is constantly changing, and the demand for talents is also changing.
As the labor market becomes saturated, some majors become colder, while others, such as artificial intelligence, continue to become hotter.
"The professional setting of colleges and universities mainly follows two logics: one is the epistemological logic of knowledge development, and the other is the demand logic of the labor market. Both play a role at the same time, but with the influence of modern social economy, the latter plays an increasingly important role. "Big." Hu Juan said that colleges and universities also have "bounded rationality" when setting up majors. When civil engineering majors are popular, many schools will expand enrollment and add new ones that did not exist before. Parents and students are more susceptible to the influence of the current market.
"Higher education meets the needs of society, not its desires." In her view, the education department should lay out and optimize the professional structure of colleges and universities from a higher level. Colleges and universities need to be more rational in the setting of majors and cannot devote themselves to Embrace the market and stay ahead of parents and students as much as possible.
"The civil engineering major expanded too fast before, but now it has shrunk. In this process, a group of people just caught up with the changing point and may face pain." Hu Juan believes that students and parents should not be fooled when applying for majors. Regardless of whether you are hot or cold at the moment, stick to your own interests, study more trends in economic and social development, and try to choose a major that is more in line with future development.
At the same time, Hu Juan believes that this further shows that what higher education provides students cannot be too strong a professional education, but should be a kind of thinking education.
According to Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, the current way of setting majors has certain flaws.
On the one hand, it is not in line with the human growth and development process and rules for students to enter a certain major without knowing their strengths and potentials; on the other hand, the society's demand for employment positions is changing, and the plans when entering school often do not keep up. Changes at the time of graduation; coupled with the too detailed division of majors, the coverage of knowledge students learn in school is too narrow, the employment adaptability is reduced, and people are instrumentalized to a certain extent.
Chu Zhaohui said that many mainstream universities in the world do not set majors when students enroll, and adopt standardized course selection and credit systems to allow students to find the direction of interest. In fact, the choice of study and employment is left to the students themselves. , thus greatly reducing the huge gap between the majors studied and employment needs.
It can be noted that in recent years, many domestic universities have also been promoting enrollment reforms and implementing broad-based enrollment and broad-based training.
Chu Zhaohui believes that standardized course selection and credit systems are the mainstream of global higher education development, which are more efficient, more suitable for students, and more adaptable to market development.
(Some names in the article are pseudonyms) (End)