Jobs scarce for China's graduates

By Mitchell Landsberg | Los Angeles Times
28 December 2006

Each year millions of new degree holders vie for few openings. Some blame official policy.

BEIJING — For the better part of a 20-hour journey, Yu Meng had slept as the train jostled and rolled across the north of China.

A broad-faced, cheerful 26-year-old graduate student in chemistry, she had come from remote Gansu province to attend a job fair in the capital. Now, still bundled in a knee-length brown parka, a clutch of resumes in her hand, she was trying to elbow her way to the front of a recruiting booth — one of hundreds sprawled across the vast interior of the capital's China International Exhibition Center.

Around her swirled thousands of other recent and upcoming college graduates from all over China, all competing for a limited pool of jobs. It was a graduate's nightmare that mirrored a national problem: too many people, too few jobs.

Figures vary, but the size of China's higher education system appears to have at least quadrupled in the last decade as the nation has pushed relentlessly toward building a modern economy. Next spring, Chinese colleges and universities expect a record 4.95 million graduates, up 820,000 from this year.

More than a million of them will wind up jobless, according to estimates. The glut is leading students and colleges to what might be considered acts of desperation.

In Guangzhou recently, 286 graduates and post-graduates competed for 11 positions as street cleaners, according to the official New China News Agency. The city hired one candidate with a PhD, four with master's degrees and six with bachelor's degrees.

"Given the already grave employment situation in the country … the employment pressure on university graduates will be obvious," Wang Xuming, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education, said at a recent news conference.

All of which is causing an air of concern among students.

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