The millions of college students who graduate in China each year now face this hard reality: a college diploma no longer guarantees a good job. According to a Hong Kong economist, there is no easy fix, as structural problems with China’s manufacturing-based economy limit the need for higher education.
Educators, analysts, and the state-run press have all commented recently on the plight of China’s college graduates. A 2012 Report by the Beijing-based education research company MyCOS Institute provides some numbers giving a rough sense of the size of the problem—experts agree that numbers relating to employment in China are generally not very reliable.
According to MyCOS, nearly 570,000 students who graduated in 2011 have not yet found jobs, which accounts for roughly 8 percent of the 7.58 million graduates for that year.
In addition to unemployment, there is also the problem of underemployment faced by China’s college graduates. The MyCOS report does not say how many of those who have jobs are doing work that is appropriate to their educational level, but the problem of college graduates working at jobs for which their degree is not needed has been widely discussed in the Chinese press.
Analysts believe that a decreasing demand for the labor associated with college degrees coupled with an increasing number of graduates has led to the current employment pressure, the Chinese regime mouthpiece Xinhua reported. Academic observers have attributed the cause of the employment problem to colleges recruiting too many students, according to the state-run China Daily…
Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via Why China’s College Graduates Can’t Find Jobs | Society | China | Epoch Times.
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