Changing Majors in China: the State of Play, and the 'Quit Your Major' Discourse

This is the second piece in my changing-majors retrospective.

The second sets out the background behind the first piece’s more lyrical matter: a partial picture of where changing majors stands in China, and an overview of the “quit your major” discourse.

I. Changing Majors in China: the State of Play

The Regulations on the Administration of Students in Regular Institutions of Higher Education, newly revised by the Ministry of Education in February 2017, state plainly that a student with interest and aptitude in another major may apply to change majors, and that each university should draw up concrete procedures of its own, with fair and impartial standards and processes. How hard it is to change majors, then, and what exactly is required, are left to each university’s own discretion, and the difficulty varies from school to school.

In fact, the mainstreaming of changing majors is the broad trend, not the plea of a tiny few. Take Shandong University: among the cohort admitted in 2018, more than 30% were unhappy with the major they had been placed in; a year on, 488 changed majors in the spring round and 51 in the fall — over five hundred students switched, a figure that had again climbed markedly over the years before. The same was appearing at major universities everywhere. Great numbers of students in the majors people are urged to quit changing course of their own accord is no longer news: at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), the 2016 civil engineering cohort moved over to architecture in droves; at Wuhan University (WHU), half the 2018 cohort of the civil engineering school transferred into computer science and economics and management; at Shandong University (SDU), more than half the 2018 cohort of the materials school filed applications to change majors.

Even with the mechanism in place, stories keep surfacing of top students who “drop out of an elite university, repeat the gaokao year, and test into an elite university again,” all for the sake of a different major. 熊丙奇, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, has said that most schools still attach relatively harsh conditions to changing majors, the “score threshold” among them. “Switching majors still has its limits. As a rule, a student must first learn their current major well in order to earn the right not to study it. At many schools, to move from major A to major B, your GPA in A must reach a certain mark — 3.7, say — before you even qualify. This lands you in a bind much like the one in Catch-22: the student with no interest, who does badly, cannot switch; the one who does well is the one who qualifies.”[1]

Because the allocation of educational resources has its limits, the reality that universities cannot throw changing majors fully open will persist, and for some time yet will sharpen. Meanwhile, for students in Europe and America, switching has long been an everyday affair: more than half of American college students have changed their major, and applying undecided draws ever more attention in American undergraduate admissions. The latter resembles the “broad-category admissions” widely rolled out in gaokao placement in recent years, though the two differ markedly in purpose. The American undecided track descends from the traditional ideals of American elite education: the undergraduate years are for seeking truth and exploring, a season in which students ought to range across the disciplines until they find where their interest truly lies. China’s “broad-category admissions” claims, on its face, to let undergraduates choose majors by interest as well, but the “category” is usually a token merger of the small branches under one first-level discipline, not a genuine spread of majors across a whole division of learning.

Worth mentioning is another important purpose the policy serves: packaging garbage majors. To take my own case: Shandong University’s civil engineering school ran broad-category admissions for the 2018 cohort, pooling everyone into the “civil engineering category.” In the fourth round of national discipline evaluations, Shandong University’s civil engineering was rated B+ — but that was hardly the category’s only destination. After we filled in our preferences for the major split, the academic affairs office — drawing no distinction among the provinces’ differing gaokao systems — applied an unreasonable way of ranking gaokao scores and reassigned the lower-ranked students en bloc into the school’s other majors, among them “garbage” majors with trailing discipline ratings such as hydraulic and hydropower engineering (C-) and engineering mechanics (C-).

On one side, the score-gap and reassignment rules bar a large crowd of students admitted right at the cutoff from the major they long for. This is plainest at the giant universities — Shandong, Sichuan, Jilin — where the traditional-engineering “quit” majors, biology, environmental science, chemistry, and materials, take in masses of reassigned students at low scores hugging the admission line, so as to keep the vast scale of their discipline-building fed.

On the other side, changing majors at Chinese universities is itself a policy piloted and spread only after 2015. In the eyes of the generation before, that university majors could not be changed was simply the order of things; against their elders’ preconceptions and the shackles of inherited ideas, students of the new generation need momentum enough before the thought of changing majors turns into action. Happily, in the decade from 2010 to 2019, with the internet boom at its back, the data and shared experience around changing majors grew rich beyond measure, and young netizens at last had information enough to decide by. Of that scene, the most typical specimen is the “quit your major” discourse on Zhihu.

II. The “Quit Your Major” Discourse on Zhihu

In its narrow sense, the “quit your major” discourse urges people not to study the experimental disciplines that are not employment-oriented, labor-intensive, and severed from industry, and helps students in those sinkhole majors escape — to change through self-knowledge, and move into fields with better pay and conditions, better suited to their own needs. In its broad sense, it speaks to every student whose major does not fit and who needs a way out.

It can be understood simply: the “quit your major” discourse is those who walked the road first, and met its potholes, leaving a warning for those who have not yet set out. Its essence, and its reason for being, is the erasing of information asymmetry. Those ahead give those not yet in the pit a chance to steel themselves. Not everyone can take the message and wake from the hypnotic climate of these disciplines — after all, the frog bathing in warm water seldom has the nerve to leap from its cage.

The discourse first took shape in the early 2010s. 霍华德 (an elder of the Zhihu quit-your-major circle, and an algorithm engineer at Tencent) holds[2] that the background and causes of its rise form a single composite force which, resolved, has the following four components:

University enrollment expansion left the “quit” disciplines with a glut of graduates. For contrast: before the expansion, in the 1980s and 90s, these disciplines were short of people, and their graduates were prized at every work unit. There was a future in it.

Industrial upgrading failed: the industries these disciplines belong to failed to move up the chain, can only turn out low- and mid-grade product at thin margins, and so pay their professionals poorly. For contrast: Taiwan has TSMC, a leading firm that takes more than 50% of the profit in global chipmaking, which is why materials is a hot major in Taiwan.

The return on effort is low: the “quit” disciplines carry heavy coursework and heavy lab loads, their working conditions are dangerous, yet the rewards are not high. For contrast: humanities majors, whose rewards are likewise middling, have seen no quit-your-major movement of any scale, because the coursework is light and the environment agreeable.

The problem of disciplinary orientation. If industrial upgrading has failed, the discipline ought to develop in the direction that would bring it about. Instead the “quit” disciplines steer by the publishing of papers. Riding south to reach the north. It leaves their industries’ upgrading forever over the horizon.

Plainly, Zhihu’s quit-your-major discourse is aimed at students of the traditional engineering fields. Today, in biology, chemistry, environmental science, and materials, in civil, mechanical, energy, and electrical engineering, discipline-building and enrollment still run at the headlong pace of the late twentieth century, while the job market has been turned on its head. Graduates of the “quit” majors have thus become the textbook oversupply; the outlook for a bachelor’s degree alone is worrying, and most students dig in for the graduate entrance exam, running toward the blue ocean of employment their advisers speak of. Yet apart from the rare born genius of each field, the rest — the graduate students who swallowed the indoctrination and held the line — find out only at graduation that the jobs and the pay of traditional engineering fall far short of the pie once painted in the pitch.

On the plane of education, Academician 欧阳颀 has rendered this judgment on biology:

Global Science: You seem to have said something to this effect — the 21st century is the century of the life sciences, but do not enter a biology department. Why take that view?

欧阳颀: The view has several layers. First, education in university biology departments needs deep reform. I have a verdict: many university biology departments are not doing education; they are doing de-education.

Why do I say so? Look at the state of mind of biology students when they enter and their state of mind when they graduate, and you will know. This is de-education through and through. The biology curriculum is designed almost entirely around memorization, and however much you memorize, by the time you graduate it is all forgotten. So the people biology departments produce cannot possibly make great contributions to biology on questions of systems and quantitation.

Beyond that, biology needs to take certain parts of the science and make them engineering, make them scale. What does engineering mean? It means design and production can be separated, and the mark of that separation is a theory able to predict, quantitatively, how the thing you designed will behave — such-and-such an input yields, without fail, such-and-such an output. The higher your power of prediction, the stronger your power of design, and the more safely you can hand the blueprint to the production floor, sure that building to plan will raise no problems. Biology today has no quantitative computation at all; how is it to predict? To hope that biologists trained the present way will drive the technological revolution of the 21st century — that is a very long way off.

Set beside the broad information-technology sector, finance, medicine, or law, the knowledge demanded by the “quit” majors is no lighter — if anything heavier — yet the pay is astonishingly low; civil engineering adds its own prisoner’s dilemma of worksites dirty, chaotic, and mean, forever chasing projects from place to place, no rest the whole year, and no time left over for family. In these majors, then, difficulty of study and actual reward do not move in line. Put another way, this is the core tenet of the quit-your-major discourse: choice outweighs effort. Only a career path that matches your own interest, returns a fair yield on what you put in, and stands where the industry’s wind is rising can carry a life along the arc you imagine for it.

In sum, the forebears of the quit-your-major discourse trace back to the early university graduates who changed careers. Take the view that circulated widely in our parents’ generation: what you major in has nothing to do with the work you will do. That was the discourse in embryo. In the talent-accumulating phase of the modern university, gaokao admission existed mainly to sift out the people capable of higher-order work; knowledge studied and career followed had not yet formed today’s tight coupling. To this day, graduates who take up work wholly unrelated to their major still hold half the employment market.

Let some famous lines from 蒋老师 (computer science at Renmin University of China; Zhihu id 到处挖坑蒋玉成)[3] serve as the close:

“In the end, the people we urge to quit include the high schoolers and younger undergraduates who do not yet know better; the older undergraduates and newly enrolled master’s students steeped in dreams of ‘the academic path’ and ‘giving oneself to research,’ with no true measure of their own strength; and the master’s and doctoral students already passing their days in pain, who lack the courage for the first step out and so can only sink further where they are. The purpose of urging them out is to wake the younger students from that uncomprehending dream, so that by reasoned and objective analysis they may judge whether the road they are on truly suits them — and if it does not, plan their leave early; and to help the older students fix their resolve and take that first step, the one that matters most and comes hardest — because once the first step is taken, many of the hard problems after it will, in the end, break open of themselves.”

[1]. From Xinhuanet, Why Can’t Universities Throw Changing Majors Fully Open? Analysis: the Allocation of Educational Resources Has Its Limits

[2]. Zhihu id: 霍华德

[3]. Zhihu id: 到处挖坑蒋玉成