Sun Fengbo (left) conducts internship at a furniture factory in Zhoudong Village, Shandong Province.

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A project team from Peking University conducted eight investigations during the past 14 years, sampling about 20,000 subjects each time. It is the most inclusive survey of its kind in terms of duration and variables that has been carried out since the expansion of university admission.
The project team has found that China’s economy, society and higher education underwent enormous changes during this period, which can be observed in the following aspects.

The scale of higher education has dramatically expanded. Higher education is no longer limited to a privileged few. Gross enrollment rate exceeded 15 percent in 2002. Higher education became increasingly popular, with the index reaching 42.7 percent in 2016. China has surpassed the United States to become the country with the largest higher education scale.

The domestic economy has started to grow vigorously. GDP per capita increased from $1,000 to $8,000 between 2001 and 2017, and it is predicted to exceed $10,000 soon. Fundamental changes took place in the sector structure. The service sector’s contribution to added value exceeded that the manufacturing sector for the first time. It developed into a driving factor of economic growth in 2016, accounting for 51.6 percent of total value added.

Also, economic integration across the world has led to educational globalization. The country’s trade scale increased so quickly since its 2001 entry into the WTO that it is expected to become the world’s largest trader in 2030. The period coincided with an increase in the number of Chinese studying overseas. About 608,000 Chinese went abroad to continue their education in 2017.

China’s urbanization rate exceeded 50 percent in 2011 and it outstripped the world’s average metric in 2013. Large and medium-sized cities have shown immense advantages in economic development. Thirty-six provincial capitals and five cities independent municipalities, home to nearly one-fifth of entire population, produced more than 40 percent of the total GDP in 2016.

Meanwhile, the internet era has had a profound impact on domestic economy. Internet companies pioneered by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are developing robustly. The financial sector used to lead the average salary among all domains and it gave way to the IT industry in 2016. Furthermore, creativity sector and entrepreneurship serve as new growth poles for employment.

The eight surveys reflect the characteristics and tendencies of graduate employment since the expansion of university admission.

Graduates tend to have more choices. Around 15.1 percent of graduates decided to go abroad for further education or to live in 2003 and it grew to 26.4 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, the combined proportion of graduates who have become freelancers or started their own business has been in the double digits since 2007 and hit the highest 25.4 percent in 2015. The difficulties caused by high unemployment among university graduates have been adequately addressed. The focus of university graduate employment has shifted from quantity to quality.

Employment rates of graduates with different educational backgrounds tend to balance. Employment rate of college graduates was the lowest among all categories in 2003, 55.3 percent and 40.8 percent lower than that of students with a master’s degree or doctorate, respectively. The index outstripped the students with a bachelor degree by 0.7 percentage points in 2005. Nearly 90 percent college graduates were hired in 2015 and 2017, ranking the first among all educational backgrounds.

The competitive employment rate of college students can be attributed to such factors. Colleges and vocational schools have adopted skills-based education to meet demand on the labor market. They are paying greater attention to career guidance and such services have proven effective. Also, most college students tend not to pass up job opportunities, because their expectations for future employment are not as high as their counterparts. These characteristics have shown that the country has modified the structure of educational backgrounds to adapt to labor markets.

Four out of five graduates seek job opportunities in big and medium-sized cities and most graduates flow to private companies. Private companies have caught up from behind to become the dominant destination while State-owned enterprises (SOE) remain attractive to graduates. SOEs hired about one-third of graduates under the effects of SARS, the global financial crisis and weak economic recovery, and they continued employing more than 20 percent of graduates in the other surveyed years.

Technology, management and service topped the list graduates’ preferred areas, which has grown diversified. Fewer than 7 percent of graduates entered first-line industrial and agricultural production. In terms of sectors, finance and IT are the most popular choices as the internet economy booms and the industrial structure shifts.

More than 6 percent of graduates found jobs in finance in 2009, but the figure reached 15.2 percent in 2015, the highest among all sectors. The IT industry hired an average of more than 10 percent of graduates in the surveyed years. However, a sharp decline was seen in employment of manufacturing sector. The proportion fell from 18.2 percent to 10.4 percent between 2009 and 2015, and it rebounded slightly to 11.2 percent in 2017.

When choosing a career, graduates prioritize future development and economic benefits. Interests and stability also matter. What makes graduates succeed in labor market? Working ability, pertinent internship and job techniques are the top three elements, followed by types of major and university as well as academic performance. In 2017, people can hardly get a job through relatives’ help or bribing. A local hukou and male gender no longer have advantage as well. In this context, domestic labor market for university graduates is fairly standard.

 

(edited by MA YUHONG)