Universities and colleges in Guangdong will expand admission rate for students seeking postgraduate courses by 25 percent and college degree courses by 12.6 percent starting next year.

A Guangdong education work meeting said Tuesday, the province's 34 higher learning institutions had admitted 30,000 more students in 2004 than the previous year, an increase of 32 percent.

Zheng Detao, chief of the Guangdong Provincial Education Department said the province would improve the level of higher education institutions by encouraging universities and colleges to apply for postgraduate education programs.

The employment rate for Guangdong students for 2004 was 95.3 percent with 119,626 graduates finding jobs, an increase of five percent over the previous year.

Graduates in engineering, computer science, electronics, advertising, international business, finance or enterprise management easily found jobs this year, the Southern Metropolitan News reported.

The meeting was also told the province would establish more senior high schools where there had been a bottleneck in provincial education development because of the limited number of high schools. Only 65 percent of graduates had advanced from junior schools to senior schools and the total admission rate for colleges was 51.8 percent this year, far lower than other provinces.

Editor: Catherine