袁野 中国海洋大学

                       Indulgence turn dreams into nightmares 
                       but diligence turn them into realities

Men are dreamers. So are dogs. The difference is: men are magicians. They sometimes turn their dreams into realities and sometimes they do the opposite. For many years it has been a reality that a college education give a young Chinese the guarantee for a better job, higher pay and more promising future. Now for many, it is only a daydream. Statistics shows every year, many of the six million college graduates could not find even a decent job and their expected pays are even lower than many much less educated migrant workers. Why the beautiful dreams of so many college graduates turn into the nightmare?

Some claims the cause is structural unemployment: students’ majors are not what the markets need. Others blame the irrationally rapid expansion of college enrollment to overburden the labor market. Still others accuse university faculty of concentrating only in their research and neglecting their students.

But why find faults with others, while college students ourselves have something really to blame?

Nowadays, as my personal experience has told me, or as you may see,  more and more Chinese college students work less and less on their study. They sleep more and read less; They play more and work less; they date more and cooperate less. Some daydream in the class, play computer games overnight, cheat on exams.  They wait for the weekend during the week, and for the vacation during the semester. Still some more study just for a diploma: they take knowledge as a rote memory exercises and cram just to get enough scores to pass the exams, never using their own brains to work things out. To make things worse: they meet with more and more lenient professors to let them pass, to create a special Chinese higher education character: it is hard to get in, but it is easy to get out with a diploma. As a result, though China has the largest labor force in the world, many companies and government institutions have to go overseas to find urgently-needed personnel that our universities should make us to be. Why? Just as some HR managers claim, college graduates are no longer what they were ten or twenty years before. That’s the reason why dreams turn into nightmares.

Ladies and gentlemen: I know we Chinese have wits and wisdom to solve the problem. What I can do here is to call for my fellow students: follow our nation’s self-disciplinary tradition to be more strict to ourselves, both in study, in work and in our daily life. I also call for our professors: to sing the battle hymn of the Tiger Mother, to be strict on your students, for me, for you, and more importantly for our nation’s future. Indulgence turn dreams into nightmares, while diligence and challenges often transform even the most ambitious dreams into realities.

Thank you!