Tough job market teaches China's graduates a lesson

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-02-17 17:30

BEIJING -- Yan Ju should consider herself lucky.

She's been offered a job at a hotel where she served as an intern for a month while millions of other graduates are still desperately seeking work.

Yan, however, is still holding out for something better.

"My ideal is to work with the financial sector of a state-owned enterprise," says the 22-year-old, who will graduate from the Beijing Technology and Business University in June.

She wants a job where she can use her statistics major, but she sees no chance of that at the little-known hotel, one of the "internship bases" promoted to graduates by the government.

Almost 2,000 companies have been named "internship bases", offering 60,000 positions in finance, publishing,telecommunications,manufacturing and transportation.

Businesses that can provide positions for at least 10 interns each year with basic living allowances can be selected for the scheme,one of the measures to ease the imbalance between a glut of graduates and a shortage of "high end" jobs worsened by mass lay-offs and business closures.

According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS), 7.1 million college graduates will chase jobs this year,including 1 million who failed to secure employment last year.

Premier Wen Jiabao said in January that finding jobs for graduates was a government priority, and the State Council announced a series of new measures to boost graduate employment over the weekend.

Most of the measures, including a three-year internship program for 1 million graduates, encourage students to lower their expectations to jobs in rural areas or in smaller firms, for example.

The first batch of the "internship bases" are mostly little-known private companies and some give the graduates an experience far from their imagined career.

"I tried almost everything except cooking in the hotel, such as room service, waitress and office work as well," Yan says.

It failed to lower her expectations, and Yan is still looking for any possible vacancy at a state-owned enterprise, which she believes may provide her with better career prospects.

"All my roommates have the same idea. We may accept lower salaries, but not mismatching or less decent jobs," she says.

Her words will disappoint officials and experts who have been telling graduates they must be more pragmatic.

The government has expanded higher education over the past decade. The number of students on campus has quadrupled since 1998, but the job market has failed to keep pace.

The situation has been exacerbated by the global financial crisis, which has seen 20 million migrant workers lose their jobs in cities, and many factory closures due to weakening foreign demand.

"Why don't the graduates consider to work in small domestic private companies, which also need talent," asks Ji Baohong, a deputy to the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress.

But many graduates see this as a last resort, even if the pay is good. "If I am employed in a small private company, I will worry whether it will close some day," says Yan.

Only 5,500 students had registered on the "internship bases program" website as of Monday.

Wu Kemin, Communist Party secretary of the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, says their "high expectations" are understandable.

"They spent a lot of money on their education, and of course they'll expect a good return."

Xiong Bingqi, professor of education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says most Chinese parents spare nothing to send the children to the best kindergartens, primary schools, high schools and universities to receive best education they can afford.

Their goal is, of course, to get the "best jobs", so it's not easy for them to change their minds, Xiong says.

Xia Yinyin, a finance major at Peking University, is unshaken in her determination to find a job at a multinational investment bank, although her dream of working in Hong Kong, Asia's financial hub, has died.

Xia looked set for a job in a prestigious Hong Kong-based investment bank after a five-week internship there last summer, but the bank scrapped its recruitment plan this year due to the financial crisis.

Xia was forced to try domestic commercial banks, but she finally clinched a contract with a multinational investment bank before accepting an offer from one of the country's four big state-owned commercial banks.

"Getting into the right sector is more important to me than everything else," Xia says.

Xiong Bingqi says the government and society must do more than telling students to lower their expectations.

A disdain for laboring or grassroots positions, usually less "decent" and with poor social security, is not only the students' only problem.

"In the long term, the government should cut college education costs, re-adjust university curricula to more practical subjects, improve the social security system, and help people form a more rational attitude to different jobs," he says.

But many college students believe the fierce job competition has already forced them to make concessions, abandoning dreams of scholarships abroad in favor of finding a stable, but possibly uninteresting, job.

Sang Zimao, a Laotian major at Beijing Foreign Studies University, is considering declining three offers from British colleges if he passes the interview for a civil service post.

Sang, 23, has been striving to study in Britain for two years, taking intensive English courses and planning to study international relations.

The change came in January, after he survived the first written test for national civil servant positions, which 90 percent of applicants failed. He then fought all the way into the final interview phase.

"Finding a good job is so difficult. If I can get one now, why not keep it?" he says.

But sooner or later, the graduates must come face to face with reality.

Chen Yongli, director of the Peking University Student Career Center, says more graduates have applied for grassroots positions in rural areas this year.

Yan Ju admits that if she can't find "a preferred job" by June, she will consider "something I can do", such as the hotel's offer.

"I'm practical, and I won't leave myself unemployed without trying any possibility."