In a cafe here in Lijiang, I came across an issue of China Today from a few months ago that featured a series of articles on the difficulties young university graduates are having in finding jobs (i.e. the “ant people” phenomenon).
The article brought up a number of reasons for why many university graduates have difficulty finding jobs that match their level of education, but perhaps the most striking was haw dramatically university enrolment has increased over the past decade. From the article:
“The expansion of Chinese university enrolment began in 1999. When the first crop of students after the expansion left school in 2003, employment difficulties for university graduates started emerging,” says Dr. Wang Boqing, CEO of MyCOS.
Demand-Supply Discrepancies
Many blame enrolment expansion for rising graduate unemployment. At the 2009 Employment Blue Book issuance conference in June, Prof. Chen Yu, vice president of the China Association for Employment Promotion and president of the China Institute of Occupational Research affiliated with Peking University, stated, “The number of university graduates was 1 million in 2002, and increased to 1.6 million in 2003. This year the figure will reach 6.1 million, an increase of 600 percent in seven years. With the world’s largest population of university graduates, China is under constant pressure to provide them with jobs.”
However, Chen Yu disagrees that enrolment expansion is the root cause for rising unemployment amongst college graduates. “China is at the lower levels of the international division of labor, so job vacancies tend to be in labor-intensive industries. The shortage of white-collar positions is the main reason why university graduates find it hard to get the jobs they desire.”
Some people blame the world financial crisis for the cold spell on the domestic white collar human resources market. However, the downturn has barely been felt among graduates from vocational schools. Compared with 2007, the employment rate for university graduates in 2008 dropped by 3 percent, while that of advanced vocational school graduates remained steady. “China’s low-added-value, labor-intensive industrial structure does not generally require a high-quality workforce, as indicated by the 95-99 percent graduate employment rate that intermediate vocational and secondary technical schools have maintained in recent years,” says Chen Yu.
In one of my last classes before leaving Wuhan a few weeks ago, one of my students offered her analysis of the phenomenon, and said that while part of the problem is an over-supply of university graduates, another aspect of the problem is that young people today have much less patience in their jobs than entry-level workers did in the past. If the salary or working conditions don’t meet their expectations, after 6 months or a year they switch jobs, and have to start at the bottom of the ladder at another company, rather than slowly working their way up in one place. Because of this, they find it increasingly difficult to escape from low-paid, entry-level positions.
Ironically, the China Today article also points out (citing a much-cited McKinsey report from 2005) that from an employer’s perspective, there’s a significant and growing talent shortage — there are lots of university graduates, but few are qualified for the types of roles that companies need.
It seems that investment in education would have been better spent increasing the quality rather than the quantity of university spots — or, if investment in higher education is intended as a first push towards moving the Chinese economy up the value chain (anticipating future market demand rather than responding to current market demand), at the very least quality and quantity need to improve together.
Interesting, thanks for that .