Logistics Education in China

Though the advancement of higher education in China has produced more graduate students for entering level positions in foreign logistics companies, locating qualified candidates is a real challenge. Several of the recruiting personnel we interviewed from Western companies who expressed their frustration at finding the “right talent” for their supply chain roles. In general, the number of qualified individuals fell fall short of the number of open roles US companies were seeking to fill.

One of the reasons for this lack of available talent is that the level of higher education in logistics in China remains nascent comparing to available degree-granting institutions in America, Japan and Europe. This became apparent in our discussions with Chinese university faculty and administration. We found that faculty research, case studies, and textbooks and in logistics are limited, partly due to the developmental state of logistics business practices in the country. Many of the faculty were also trained in an era when logistics management was a marginally interesting field, and was limited to theoretical models with little application to modern logistics best practices.

In Chinese universities, many logistics institutes or departments were transformed from former departments of transportation, delivery, communication, etc. in early 2002 after the Chinese government announced the importance of logistics education. Restricted by their original resources in curriculum, faculty and experimental facility, those logistics programs and majors remained focus on a specific dimension of logistics, as opposed to a global and holistic perspective on supply chain integration. For example, if the department was originally transformed from transportation, the resulting curriculum focused specifically on transportation delivery tactics.

We found that many logistics programs’ curriculum are formed primarily on the content areas their faculty are able to teach, not by the content required by industrial recruiters. As such, much of the curriculum covers only a narrow tranche of modern supply chain concepts. Our research identified the primary subjects of the top 20 Chinese graduate school universities that offer logistics degrees. This information was gleaned from interviews and reviewing course curricula on the universities’ websites. The primary subject offered in logistics graduate programs is economics, followed by general business, transportation, mechanical engineering, management science, logistics engineering, and industrial engineering. None of the schools we examined had a pure set of courses specifically dedicated to global logistics and supply chain management.

Because of this situation in higher education, students are becoming educated on singular dimensions of logistics without understanding the breadth and need for integration across an entire logistics system, and indeed, across the extended supply chain. The breadth requirements dictated by SCOR ( Supplier’s supplier to customer’s customer) is not understood in this context. Because of the lack of investment in new faculty who are educated and have completed dissertations that cover end to end supply chain management, and the lack of cooperation between universities and industries, most Chinese students graduate from logistics majors lack the fundamental and practical capabilities needed to be effective in the businesses they go to work for.

There is ample evidence of these shortcomings. A recent study of college graduate students discovered that the most common complaints were the lack of opportunity for practical on the job training and internships, an out-of-date curriculum and the lack of case studies and other active learning environments in Chinese universities.

There is a massive need for universities to train graduates in modern logistics and supply chain practices. This is an opportunity for US and European schools to partner with Chinese universities and develop faculty, teaching materials, and case studies for educating students in these areas.