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.

Today QQ news ran a story on “ant people” in Wuhan (“江蚁” — Sogou doesn’t list that one as a word yet). According to the article, Wuhan has the largest number of university graduates of any Chinese city, with the total number of graduates in 2009 reaching somewhere around 250 000. Although no one knows for sure how many of these young people end up in low-income jobs, according to estimates there could be anywhere from around 50 000 to 100 000 “ant people” in Wuhan.

One of the “ant people” interviewed for the article works in a photo studio, with a salary of 1000 yuan per month. She shares a room with two others in a similar situation, and her share of the rent is 260 yuan per month. They don’t have a kitchen, so for breakfast she has 热干面, (hot and dry noodles, a Wuhan specialty) or 素粉 (plain noodles), for lunch it’s 盒饭 (a boxed lunch with rice and one or a few pre-prepared dishes) for less than 5 yuan, and then something simple for dinner, for a total of less than 10 yuan per day. To help cover monthly expenses, some people take on monthly jobs, and others roll out blankets or set up small stalls to sell things on the street after work.

The author of the article points out that although the “ant people” phenomenon, with its own specific characteristics, is new, the 80s and 90s saw the unemployed youth (待业青年) and the “north and south drifters” (南漂北漂). In each generation, young people lead difficult lives. What particularly defines the difficulties facing the generation born in the 80s is the growing gap between rich and poor and the lack of a social safety net to protect those who fall behind. The issue certainly seems to have struck a chord with young people all over China — even many whose lives aren’t as difficult as those of the “ant people” can still relate to the struggles of finding a job and saving up for a house, and share the dream of a safe and stable future.

Yesterday in class, the topic of suicide came up. One of my students told me that a student at her university committed suicide a few days ago, supposedly because of relationship problems, and other students chimed in with examples from their own schools. I don’t know if the suicide rate among young people in China is unusually high, but there seems to be a perception that it is, and that in today’s society there’s simply too much pressure on young people. A recent case in which a graduate of Wuhan University who was studying for a post-graduate degree in Shanghai committed suicide, reportedly because of financial pressure, has also drawn attention.

My students asked me how Western universities handle these issues. They seemed frustrated that the university provided no information about what had happened, and the students were left to speculate on their QQ group. Depression is a problem in every society, and it’s impossible to generalize about why people choose to end their lives, but it seems like many Chinese universities could do more to help students who are unhappy. Although Harvard has drawn criticism for not doing more to protect students’ mental health, the university has at least put in place basic measures to support students, like free and readily available access to mental health counseling, and efforts to remove the stigma of getting help. Even just acknowledging the problem and accepting that the university bears some level of responsibility for students’ mental health goes a long way.

Although young, well-educated people in China have a world of possibilities in front of them, the pressure they face also seems to be immense. For a university student, there are so many possible paths to take — they can choose to work or study anywhere in China (and often assume that they’ll have to move to a different part of the country to follow the best opportunities, placing them thousands of miles from their friends and families); they can choose to study abroad, in virtually any English-speaking country or any Western European country, meaning they need to compare and navigate dozens of different educational systems in order to make the best choice (or, if they can afford it, pay an agent to help them with the decision); they can continue to study their own major (which was often chosen for them by their parents, or at the very least with a great deal of input from their parents, and is therefore not necessarily something they find interesting), or they can take a risk and switch to something new altogether; they can look for a job, either in a Chinese state-owned company, in a small local company, or in a big multinational company, each with its own very distinct culture and requirements for success.

If they make the right choice, in 8-10 years they’ll be able to buy an apartment, get married, and take care of their parents. If they make the wrong choice, there’s no social welfare system to fall back on. There’s no natural path, and the pressure to make the right choices be enormous.

According to the book, this “ant generation” makes up a fourth disadvantaged group in society, in addition to farmers, migrant workers, an laid-off workers. Although they have a high level of education, they can only find low-paid and usually temporary work (with no contracts or insurance), or spend their time traveling to different parts of the city for job interviews. Like ants, they’re intelligent, they live in groups, and although they’re weak individually, collectively they can wreak havoc. They’re also hardworking, and they always seem to manage to find ways around any obstacles placed in their way.

The plight of the “ant generation” seems to have stricken a chord, especially among people my age, who either know people in this situation or know that this could easily be them if they’re unlucky when the time comes to find a job. To see more on what their lives are like, take a look at these youku clips (in Chinese) here, here (where you’ll see Happy Farmer being played on a computer in a tiny apartment) and here (to see how it’s possible to eat in Beijing for just 10 yuan a day).

If lots of university graduates are working low-paid and relatively low-skilled jobs, that seems to imply that there’s probably an oversupply of university graduates. (At the same time, there’s often talk about China’s talent shortage, especially at the highest levels, but this probably has more to do with the quality of university education than the number of people with degrees). In a country that places such an incredibly high value on education, it makes sense that more people might pursue advanced degrees than the market needs, and reducing the number of degree spots would probably be incredibly unpopular.

But even if more people getting university degrees than the economy right now needs is one factor, there’s probably more at play that just that. Another possible factor is that too many people are moving to big cities after graduation, maybe because of unrealistic expectations of job opportunities in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and people who are the first in their family or village to get a university education probably feel a lot of pressure to make full use of that degree. And the high cost of living in big cities is due in large part to high house prices, made worse by a possible housing bubble that has been partly fueled by government politics and the way in which the stimulus package was spent. Or maybe, like people here would likely say, 中国人太多了, and this kind of situation is inevitable in a country that has so many people.

Either way, I have nothing but respect for how hardworking Chinese people of my generation are, and I’m very grateful that I don’t need to buy an apartment in a Chinese mega-city just yet.