China’s graduates emerge to a harsher world

April 9 2009
Source: The Financial Times

Getting a job is no easy task anywhere in the world right now and China is no exception, despite the fact that the economy is still growing.

Therefore, many of the more than 6m young people who are due to graduate from university in China this June are becoming nervous.

“I don’t know where I am going to go three months from now,” says Zhang Ming, an undergraduate at China Youth University for Political Sciences.

Set to finish an international trade degree this summer, he took entry exams for a post-graduate law studies programme, hoping for a chance to delay his entry to the job market beyond the current trough.

But he missed the required mark by a few points.

Now he will be forced to move out of relatively affordable student housing and lose a monthly stipend – and is clueless as to his future.

The government is as worried as the students themselves. Yin Weimin, minister of human resources and social security, has spoken of a “grave” situation and named the unemployment threat to fresh graduates as his most serious concern beside the growing army of jobless migrant workers.

None of this, however, is a surprise. Education experts say the current problems are only partly the result of the global financial crisis. They are also rooted in structural distortions stemming from failed education policies.

“One factor is that about a decade ago, we started aggressively recruiting more students into university,” says Zhao Beiping who has been giving counselling at the student career centre at Wuhan University of Technology for decades.

He observes that this has not been matched by efforts to enhance the quality of university education, nor by training to make students fitter for the job market.

“For many students, getting into university is their goal in life, and they don’t think beyond that, and unfortunately it’s the same problem with the parents,” he says, adding that “our country’s university education and human resources training are not suited to the needs of a market economy.”

In more specific terms, graduates are often well-trained in theoretical subjects but lack the practical skills and thinking wanted by employers.

Job expectations among graduates are also a gross mismatch to what is available.

“Graduates are fixated on getting jobs as civil servants, in foreign companies or big state-owned companies, and in the big cities – in short, jobs which, they have been led to believe, are the best-paid and safest,” says Mr Zhao.

As exports have plunged over the past few months, companies in the export-dependent coastal cities have become extremely cautious about hiring new staff.

The state cannot make up for that gap – in civil service exams late last year, there were only 1.3 jobs on offer for every 100 applicants.

Teachers also complain that China’s one-child policy and the rapid increase of incomes in many urban families has produced a generation that sorely lacks qualities such as the ability, treasured by older Chinese, to “eat bitterness”, or survive through hard times without complaining.

“We are talking about spoiled young people here,” said a teacher at Xiamen University who asked not to be named.

Surveys conducted by several universities indicate that students – forced to recognise reality – are starting to adjust their expectations.

While graduates at Wuhan University of Technology used to ask for starting salaries of Rmb2,000 to Rmb4,000 a month three years ago, many will now settle for Rmb1,800.

But these are just average numbers, and there is much less of a change in attitude at leading national institutions such as Peking University, Tsinghua University or Fudan University.

Graduates from relatively well-off families with household registrations in the capital or other wealthy cities, such as Shanghai or Guangzhou, are also much less inclined to lower their expectations.

That leaves those such as Mr Zhang, whose home is in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces.

“I want to work in an export enterprise somewhere in south-east China,” he says.

“But it looks like that might not work out right away, so maybe I need to go to some more backward place to work first.”

University administrations are eager to use the current crisis to give their students a better sense of what they need to prepare for when they graduate.

As a result, they are starting more counselling programmes. The government, meanwhile, urges local authorities and schools to hold more job fairs.

But that does not change the fact that there are too few jobs in the first place.

Graduates, such as Mr Zhang, from less well-known institutions and with what education experts refer to as “fashionable degrees” are losing out.

He went to job fairs held at Peking University and Tsinghua University last month. “But the morning was reserved for their own students, and by noon, there was almost nothing left,” he says.