“In 1999, the Chinese government decided to accelerate the pace of expansion in the higher education sector; since then, the enrolment number in higher education has dramatically increased, 513,000 more than that of 1998, which in total reached 1,597,000” writes Tian Shuzhan in Are Graduates of General Education Institutions More Competitive in the Job Market: Empirical Evidence from 2009-2010 (quotes to follow).
The increasing rate was 47.4%. Similarly, the increasing rate in 2000 was 38.16%; in 2001, it was 21.61%. This year in 2013, there will be 7 million graduates who will join the job market after they graduate. (See figure 1)
Along with the achievement, however, the upsurge in graduate unemployment has dogged society since 2003, when the first batch of graduates after the expansion policy went to the market. Obviously, much research has been done in order to mitigate unemployment.
The aim of this paper is to mitigate the high unemployment rate in current China. With a sudden increase in the demand for jobs, the expansion policy in higher education since 2003 has disturbed the demand-supply balance of educated manpower. China has the largest higher education sector in the world. Along with the achievement, however, the society is not prepared enough to absorb all the extra university graduates.
I use the data on employment issue of year 2009 and 2010 from MyCOS institute and analysis them from the perspective of educational capacity and locations of universities.
My conclusion is that China’s universities should upgrade the quality of the general education sector instead of training their graduates in vocational colleges. This contradicts what Chinese people traditionally think about this issue.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at
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