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Luna Sun

As job markets shrink in China, fresh graduates struggling to find meaningful employment have been forced to scale back career ambitions and salary expectations as the economy fights to regain its footing.
The reality hit home when an unusual hiring decision was made public recently, in which a 24-year-old pursuing a master’s degree in physics awaited a new job as a high school janitor in the eastern city of Suzhou.
The Suzhou High School Affiliated to Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics announced last week that it was planning to hire the postgraduate student as a janitor on a temporary contract.
The news circulated widely online as China continued to report a high jobless rate for young people.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, excluding students, rose to 18.8 per cent in August, up from 17.1 per cent in July.
This marks the highest reading since Beijing revised its statistical method and reintroduced the youth unemployment data in December, after halting its publication four months earlier.
Persistently high youth unemployment rates have posed a major challenge for Beijing as it works to stabilise the economy and restore public confidence. With nearly one in five youth unemployed as of August, social stability and public trust are at risk.
Under the earlier statistical method, the jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, including students, peaked at 21.3 per cent in June last year.
Student numbers have since been left out of the calculation, a change that the NBS said aimed to “more accurately” reflect that job-hunting was not a priority for them. The jobless rate for December was 14.9 per cent.


“This year, everyone is facing unemployment pressure, which has an added effect on youth employment – even relying on parents is no longer easy,” said Peng Peng, executive chairman of the Guangdong Society of Reform, a think tank connected to the southern provincial government.
“Right now, the only jobs that are relatively easy to find are in domestic work, like nannies, housekeeping and cleaning services.”
Hiring demand has fallen significantly as economic growth remains sluggish and businesses struggle, worsening the already challenging situation for young jobseekers.
This pressure has intensified with a record 11.79 million college graduates flooding into the labour force of the world’s second-largest economy this year.
Peng noted that in recent years, many fresh graduates had taken up work as delivery drivers. This was because the job offered relative flexibility and, as a new occupation, had wider social acceptance with less stigma attached, he said. However, the job market for delivery drivers is now fully saturated.
Multiple Chinese universities have also intensified efforts to encourage students to pursue postgraduate study, framing it as a key opportunity for personal growth.
Among them are the Shenyang Institute of Engineering in the northeastern province of Liaoning and Taishan University in eastern Shandong, which have also vowed to provide support such as tutoring and consulting services.
Apart from helping students to burnish their academic credentials, this push could help to ease immediate employment pressure and improve the universities’ placement statistics.
Pursuing a postgraduate degree has increasingly become a way for young people to delay entry into the job market as options shrink.
Institutions including Lanzhou University and the University of Science and Technology of China have recently reported a shift towards enrolling more postgraduate students than undergraduates.
At the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the number of enrolled postgraduate students is now 37 times that of undergraduates.


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Viral story of postgraduate student’s pivot from physics to school janitor highlights anxieties about youth unemployment


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