1000 yuan/month: starting salary of 4 million college students

Hong Xiangdong waited on the platform to wait for bus 224 and sweated. As a porter of a moving company in Shanghai, “I have to move two houses a day and my waist is almost cut off.” He can earn almost 800 yuan a month, but he envy the well-dressed college students who walked by.

Behind the platform of the Honghe car is the gate of Shanghai Talent Market located at No. 620 Zhongshan West Road.

Wang Hao is still standing in front of the recruitment information column, burying records of recruitment information. This 05th undergraduate from Northwest University has graduated for 5 months.

Advertising design professional, girls, and foreign accounts - Wang Hao said that it was her ideal to find a job in an advertising company in Shanghai. "The first job has a monthly salary of 1,000, and it's fine to learn something."

In the “job hunting lodge” in Shanghai where new students converge, the newly-found college students are shy about their initial employment. According to the reporter, their initial salary is an average of 1,000 yuan per month.

According to the Shanghai Labor Insurance Bureau, the minimum wage for migrant workers in the construction industry is 635 yuan, and the guide price for initial employment wages for college students is 1,000-2,000 yuan on average. Under the huge gap in academic qualifications, the prices of labor forces belonging to different groups are so close to each other.

Loss of "Investment in Education"

From the beginning of 2005, the "labor shortage" originating in the Pearl River Delta began to spread in the Yangtze River Delta. Most of the viewpoints believe that this shortage of workers is a structural and local shortage, which is particularly evident in the processing and manufacturing regions. Compared with the “shortage of rural workers”, there is also a regional structural difference in the surplus of college students.

In front of the “Talented Talents in the Western Region” window of Shanghai’s talent market, there are few college students. Although the Shanghai municipal government has issued a number of encouraging policies to call for college students to support the development of the western region, “but only three resumes are received each day for three consecutive days.”

Responsible for the relevant western information staff, some colleges and universities in Shanghai have given 10,000 yuan per student who volunteered to serve the western region, but college students have their own calculations.

“Looking for a 3,000-month salary in Shanghai will earn 36,000 yuan a year. In the west, if you remove the 10,000-yuan bonus, it will be easy to earn 26,000 a year.” In the western provinces, the average monthly salary of undergraduates is only 1200 yuan. Around Yuan, "How many volunteers can there be?"

Wang Xi of Northwestern University believes that “work in big cities will be more promising than other students” and this idea has been recognized by most university students. The difference in economic development among regions has caused students, including parents who appear as educational investors, to have different career expectations, and regional unemployment has become inevitable.

Associate Professor Lu Ming of the Employment and Social Security Research Center at the Department of Economics at Fudan University analyzed with reporters that the basic function of higher education is to invest in human capital and send signals. The latter appears to be more important in the current Chinese labor market, such as raising the educated's social identity.

From the perspective of "investment in education," we may be able to see the clues. In 2004, a sample survey of 4,079 urban residents’ education expenditures by 24 provincial cities and towns in Zhejiang Province conducted by the Zhejiang Provincial Urban Deployment Team showed that, without considering inflation, 19 years of investment from kindergarten to university totaled 143,000. Yuan, such as an average of 5,452 yuan for the school-selection fee, a college student needs to invest a total of 148,500 yuan, not including the cumulative expenses and living expenses for participating in various training courses.

Lu Ming believes that from the perspective of human capital investment, the return on investment in university education itself is lagging behind. The gap between the expected value of parents and graduates and the return after graduation has also increased the psychological barriers for university graduates.

Behind the structural employment dilemma

In the past five years, the number of university graduates in China has been increasing year by year from 1.07 million in 2000 to 3.38 million in 2005, driven by the expansion of instruction. The education sector predicts that it will reach 4 million in 2006.

On the surface, college enrollment expansion is the direct cause of unemployment among college students. “But structural unemployment is the fundamental reason why college students find employment difficult.” Hu Ruiwen, director of the Academic Committee of the Shanghai Academy of Educational Science, believes that because of the economic structure, including industrial structure, product structure, Regional structures have changed, and the knowledge, skills, concepts, and regional distribution of the existing labor force have not been adapted to this change, and labor and market demand have not matched and unemployment has been caused.

Huang Juan (a pseudonym) is the head of human resources of a private stainless steel company in Shanghai. She has issued recruitment information on behalf of the company in the Shanghai talent market. Recruitment positions range from clerks to engineers and cover all aspects of company operations.

The company has set up two positions for clerical staff, with a salary of 1,200 yuan, requiring a college education or above. “This is the easiest to find, and the resume has already received more than 20 copies.”

One field engineer position requires a bachelor degree. “It is very difficult to recruit. The famous college students majoring in engineering and civil engineering all go to state-owned enterprises. The salary requirements of this non-branded university for this position are not low, and it is very difficult to get together.”

Domestic trade salesmen recruit 10, requiring a college degree or above, it is best to have work experience, recruiting must be able to do things. “Actually, as long as we have good tastes, academic qualifications fall second, many of our company’s old sales staff are secondary school students and high school students.”

Foreign trade clerk asked for English 6 and recruited 3 people, but only received a resume. "This position is the most difficult to recruit people," starting with a salary of 1,500 yuan plus most of the talks. "You think, can you come in English with such a good amount of money?"

This stainless steel company is a leader in the industry, but it is always difficult to find suitable talents in these two years. “Either the remuneration can't be discussed, or it can't be done in the short term.” Huang Juan has a headache.

Hu Ruiwen, who has long been engaged in the study of educational economics, and the Shanghai Academy of Sciences, entrusted by the Ministry of Education, are conducting research on the relationship between higher education reform and employment of college graduates, which involves analysis of many economic sources.

According to the survey data, since the 1990s, the value added of China's primary industry has increased by 1% per year, and 1.26 million labors have been reduced. The average value of the second industry has increased by 1%, creating 260,000 jobs; The average value added of the three industries increased by 1% each year, creating 1 million jobs.

According to Hu's analysis, the added value of the secondary industry has become less and less obvious for employment. In the transition period, the larger the share of the state-owned economy and the share of investment, the more difficult it is for the entire society to increase employment; while non-public economic sectors that are growing up do not generally have redundant staff, their share of the total economy and investment share will increase. The faster the growth.

Companies like Huang Juan are increasingly becoming the main force in absorbing labor. However, in the eyes of college students, private enterprises are far less attractive than state-owned enterprises and foreign companies.

In 2004, 35.4% of students willing to go to party and government agencies, 18.9% to state-owned institutions, 17.8% of teaching and research institutions, 13.6% of state-owned enterprises, 15 % choose foreign companies, and only 1.3% choose to go to private companies. The contradiction between the post demand for talented people and the supply of social posts is highlighted.

Is it still hard to improve in the next decade?

The extensive economic growth has caused the proliferation of "migrant workers shortage", and the correspondingly high value-added industries have lagged behind, highlighting the disadvantages of higher education development behind the employment difficulties of undergraduates.

The expansion of college enrollment in 1998, as one of the means to stimulate educational consumption, has led to a dramatic expansion in the number of graduates. Professor Yao Yuqun of the School of Labor and Human Resources at Renmin University of China analyzed that the reform of higher education in China is lagging behind the changes in the occupational structure caused by industrial restructuring. Because it depends on the strength of existing teachers, the aging professional setting cannot stimulate the innovative spirit and practice of undergraduates. The ability to operate has caused the mismatch between the demand for college students and the supply structure of college students.

According to statistics on college graduate employment data of universities directly under the Ministry of Education and other departments of the Central Government in 2004, the major with higher employment rate is engineering and engineering majors, the discipline with the lowest employment rate is jurisprudence, and the most stable one is education. Learning, the increase is more obvious is the literature major.

However, the employment rate is only one aspect of the employment situation. In fact, finance, trade, law, and IT are the industries in which China currently has the most talented people, and the talent gap is more than one million.

These popular majors often need “complex” talents, and those who have just graduated from the school obviously cannot meet the requirements of employers; while the unbalanced distribution of talented people makes the jobs in developed regions basically saturated, so there will be hot professional employment. The rate is low.