The fundamental reason why it is difficult for college students to find jobs

Since 1999, the scale of development of higher education in China has expanded rapidly at an unprecedented rate. In 2002, the total number of graduates from ordinary colleges and universities reached 1.4511 million, a net increase of 272,600 from 2001, an increase of 23.1%. In 2003, the number of fresh graduates reached 2.122 million, an increase of 670,000 from 2002, an increase of 46.2%. It should be said that describing the employment situation as "severe" is not an exaggeration. We can deeply understand this from our experience in finding a job in Daqing (see my article "A College Student's Journey to Job Hunting").

Many people believe that the reason why it is difficult for college students to find jobs is the expansion of enrollment. I think this is just the most obvious and direct reason. If you dig deeper, you will find that it is not the real reason. The country's decision to expand enrollment at that time was not wrong from a historical perspective. It was a sign of the transformation of China's higher education from "elite" to "mass". In developed countries, undergraduate education has long become mass education, and even master's degrees are becoming increasingly popular. For example, in countries such as the United Kingdom and Ukraine, you can get a master's degree in one year after graduating from a bachelor's degree.

Of course, the enrollment expansion has indeed been a bit fast in recent years. In 2002, the Ministry of Education announced that it would achieve the "15% higher education penetration rate" originally planned to be achieved in 2010. The pace is astonishing. However, I don’t think that enrollment expansion is the fundamental reason why it is difficult for college students to find jobs. China has a population of more than one billion. If it is so difficult for just two million college students to find jobs, wouldn’t most of them be unemployed? ——The problem is not the expansion of enrollment, but how to digest it after the expansion. Compared with college students, technical secondary schools, and more people with lower academic qualifications, college students have obvious advantages in finding jobs.

Obviously, although China's unemployment rate is relatively high and the employment situation is grim, it has not yet reached the point where it cannot accommodate millions of college students every year. If we want to fundamentally solve the problem of college students' difficulty in finding jobs, we should start from the following aspects:

First, higher education should stop expanding enrollment, deepen reforms, and further adapt to the needs of economic development.

Enrollment expansion is not the fundamental reason why it is difficult for college students to find jobs, but after several years of enrollment expansion, the quality of college students has declined significantly. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, the number of college students is increasing rapidly, and the average quality is inevitable. On the other hand, teachers are seriously unable to keep up. We can double or triple the number of college students in five years, but the number of teachers, especially outstanding teachers, cannot double or triple in five years. Therefore, students with lower average quality will be educated by teachers with lower average quality, and their quality will only be even lower when they graduate. Moreover, due to employment pressure, students begin to look for jobs in a hurry when they reach their senior year. Where do they have time to continue studying and do graduation projects? Nowadays, the graduation projects of many colleges and universities have become useless, and the popularity of the Internet has also provided extremely convenient conditions for students to plagiarize their graduation thesis. Objectively speaking, the average quality of college undergraduates today is not necessarily better than that of college students more than ten years ago.

The difficulty for college students to find a job is also closely related to the unreasonable educational structure. At present, foreign trade, finance, law, accounting and other majors are all becoming saturated. It is difficult for even masters to find a satisfactory job, let alone undergraduates? It is particularly difficult for graduates of these majors to find jobs, or they have to change careers.

Therefore, the author believes that the country should stop expanding enrollment in the next few years, and at least reduce the enrollment expansion ratio to less than 5. All colleges and universities should be committed to improving the teaching level and scientific research level of teachers, adjusting the teacher structure, consolidating the results of enrollment expansion, and developing higher education into "elite mass education."

However, reforming education does not happen overnight. Improving the level of teachers cannot be achieved in the short term. If some majors are reduced or even abolished, how should the corresponding teaching staff be arranged? Moreover, no matter how higher education is reformed, it is impossible to achieve 100% synchronization with social needs, so this is a process that always requires persistence and improvement.

Second, college students must also adjust their mentality to adapt to the development of society.

As mentioned above, although it is difficult to find employment in the country, it is not so difficult that even millions of college students find it difficult to find a job. A few decades ago, technical secondary school students were considered intellectuals, but now no one is proud of their technical secondary school education. A large number of technical secondary school and junior college students are engaged in jobs such as porters, doormen, and working at the counter with small bosses in storefront rooms. More College and technical secondary school students work in rural areas and county towns. Therefore, when this society is filled with more and more college students, some college students will inevitably take jobs that they "didn't look down on" in the past. Since higher education is no longer an elite education, college students must adjust their mentality, lower their requirements, and adapt to the needs of social development.

In fact, if college students can lower their requirements, they can find many jobs. For example, Shanxi Renhe Group plans to recruit 100 people from a certain university this year to enrich the staff of a steel plant in Shanxi. However, college students think the steel plant is too remote, so only two or three people will go, while this school has thousands of graduates. The student didn't find a job. Therefore, compared with college students, technical secondary school students and even migrant workers, it is not difficult at all for college students to find a job. The key is to adjust their mentality.

This kind of mentality adjustment is painful, accompanied by spiritual suffering and sublimation. But when more and more college students move to ordinary jobs and engage in work that is “not a job”, it will inevitably lead to a gradual increase in the overall productivity and efficiency of society. This is an inevitable historical process. Now, when many college students cannot find a satisfactory job, they would rather study for the postgraduate entrance examination at home than go out to work. Some of these college students may be able to "cultivate themselves", but a considerable number of them have to go out into society after repeatedly failing the exams. The pain at this time is much greater than before, and the negative impact on individuals and society is also relatively large. . A very small number of college students will develop psychological distortions and be full of hatred for society, which will have a greater negative impact.

Third, the country should strive to increase the wage level of the entire society and create as many job opportunities as possible.

It is very important for college students to adjust their own positioning and mentality, but we cannot demand that college students adjust their mentality unilaterally. Instead, we must ask: Why are college students unwilling to engage in many jobs?

Take a look at Daqing’s example: When he earned a salary of 1,300 yuan a month in Shanghai, would he think his future was bright? There are more students with worse jobs than those in Daqing, including many college, technical secondary school, high school students and migrant workers: they work hard for a month and earn only enough money for rent and food. How can they be confident about their future? confidence? How is it possible to truly love work?

The author has seen such graduates. Because the income from their jobs was only enough for food and clothing, although they were diligent and down-to-earth at the beginning, they did not earn much money after a few years, and the need for marriage Increasingly urgent. After getting married, buying a house and educating children in the future will require a lot of investment. What should he/she do? When thinking anxiously about these issues, a young person tends to become more and more realistic. In order to survive, he/she has to come up with all kinds of crooked ways to benefit himself/herself at the expense of others, harm the public and enrich himself/herself, and even take desperate risks. So good people can turn bad at this time. If this continues, in their eyes, this society must be cruel and life-and-death, and they will gradually treat others with this attitude. And when society is full of such people, it will cause the moral decline of the entire society.

So why are their wages so low? Of course we can explain it from the supply and demand relationship in cold economics: since the total supply of labor exceeds the total demand, the decline in labor prices is inevitable. This aspect is not only evident in private enterprises, but also in many state units and large state-owned enterprises, which are also reducing the wages of college students. However, the author believes that since the total food production can still feed everyone, and since the total housing area can also meet everyone's needs, there should not be a situation where people worry about life and future survival. The state and government should do their best to create an environment that is both fair and tolerant, so that all units and enterprises can improve the treatment of all staff, including college students, so that they are full of hope for their future.

I think the specific measures should be to lower taxes, reduce government spending, reduce government intervention and control in the economy, and strive to build an environment of "small government, big economy". Of course, this is a big topic and will not be expanded upon here.

In fact, in order to fundamentally solve the problem of employment difficulties for college students, we must try to solve the problem of employment difficulties in the entire society as a whole. Therefore, the government should improve the status of employment from a grand strategic perspective and shift the focus of work. I think the government should shift from a "growth first" strategy to an "employment first" strategy in order to fundamentally alleviate the current employment pressure.

In this regard, many local governments do not do well. For example, in order to beautify the city, some local governments have forcibly carried out "green projects" and demolished a large number of front-end houses, resulting in the unemployment of countless small business owners and more working boys and girls. Although the city looks more beautiful, the number of unemployed people has increased, and social unrest has also increased. While beautifying the city, the government has completely failed to consider the fact that our country has a large population. In addition, state taxation is also very detrimental to the vast number of small and medium-sized private enterprises. As private owners face increasingly difficult operations, they can only increasingly oppress and exploit many migrant workers. Moreover, due to the increasingly heavy taxes, it is also very detrimental to encouraging private entrepreneurship. In fact, it is equivalent to suppressing private entrepreneurship. If this continues, the employment situation in the entire country will only become increasingly severe.

After writing this, we will find that when we delve deeper and deeper into the problem of solving the employment difficulties of college students, it will become increasingly involved in national affairs and all aspects of the entire society. This is not at all As much as an article can explain clearly and completely, economists are still debating many specific measures. The author can only express a good wish here.

As far as college students are concerned, in the absence of special social relationships, they can only find a satisfactory job by studying hard, cultivating comprehensive abilities, improving their competitiveness, and striving to excel. Haha, this article can only end with a cliché.

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