Higher Education Brings Few Guarantees

By Gu Yongqiang. Almost 7 million college graduates will pour into China’s job market this year, but a large proportion will struggle to find suitable work. When Sam Gu was admitted to college four years ago, his parents were ecstatic. His father, an electric welder, and his mother, a cleaner at a hotel in Gu’s hometown of Wuxi, a small city near Shanghai, hoped that their son would vault into the middle class. But the family’s first college graduate is facing a grim job market in a country that desperately needs to employ its best and brightest in order to avoid social instability and trigger a further economic slowdown. “I want to get a job, but the reality is that I do not know where I can find one,” says Gu. “As far as I know, none of my 45 classmates has found a job. This is so frustrating.” Read more...