As the high school graduation season approaches, the anxiety of graduating students about to step out of school doors is overshadowing their joy. Officially inflated figures cannot conceal the real employment pressure.
According to official Chinese Communist Party data, the number of university graduates in 2025 is expected to reach a historic high of 12.22 million. Adding in the over 5 million from last year who were not employed, the market needs to absorb approximately 18 million graduates this year. The job market continues to deteriorate, even in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
Shanghai student Wang Tao (pseudonym) told Epoch Times that in the past few days, he has sent out 12 resumes for sales positions but has not received any responses. He is puzzled, wondering if other industries are not in need of personnel.
“This is Shanghai, the country’s first city, where over a million university graduates are asking, where can they go?” Wang Tao commented.
Wu Yu (pseudonym) from Shandong has been out of school for 2 years and has not been able to find a job. Recently, she has been actively attending interviews, sending out resumes to seven to eight companies all looking for employees for single workdays without weekends.
“The current employment environment for university students is really pitiful. They don’t treat us like human beings,” said Wu Yu.
A female postgraduate blogger from Zhejiang Province from the class of 2025 in the field of humanities stated that from the 2024 fall recruitment to the April 2025 spring recruitment, she sent out a total of 8,000 resumes and attended every recruitment drive for fall. As of April, she still had not found a job.
Graduates long for a stable job, but companies have different considerations. Ms. Li, a human resources manager in Beijing, mentioned that companies are leaning towards two directions when hiring. Either you are a recent graduate, in which case their unit can mold you as they wish, or they are looking for individuals with resources, hoping to profit immediately from these resources.
Xu Fan (pseudonym), a graduate from Liaoning province’s class of 2024, worked as a clerk at an educational institution after graduating, but was sacked by the boss after only three months and has been unemployed since. Among her friends and classmates, only 3 are currently employed, and one of them works in a factory.
Xu Fan has been eager to find a relatively stable job to support herself and alleviate some financial pressure on her less affluent parents. However, most of the positions she has applied for offer salaries ranging from ¥1,000 to ¥2,000, with very few offering over ¥3,000.
She explained that the current working conditions are poor, with an oversupply of labor. Employers are slashing wages, much like capital exploitation, where companies offer minimal pay to maximize profits.
Xu Fan calculated her living expenses, managing to save on rent by staying with her family. However, with transport costs and basic expenses, she needs at least ¥1,300 per month. The issue now is that with the wages offered by companies, she can’t even earn ¥1,300.
Seeing many young people who cannot afford meals or rent living under bridges, Xu Fan considers herself fortunate to be able to live with her family.
The difficult employment situation for Chinese university students is often masked by inflated official figures. Recently, a blogger involved in guiding overseas students publicly shared data from Yunnan University.
The blogger stated: “Yunnan University recently published data showing that the initial employment rate for the class of 2025 postgraduates and graduates is only 21.21%. The software college has over 53%, while the ecology college is less than 4%, specifically at 3.83%. Despite the low employment rate, rather than being criticized, it has received praise from the online community for being transparent and truthful.”
Some netizens commented, “Yunnan University is a Double First-Class Project institution. With such a low employment rate in this department, one can only imagine the situation for second and third-tier universities.”
According to data from the well-known Chinese online recruitment platform “Zhaopin,” the employment rate for Chinese university graduates in 2024 was 55.5%.
In March 2025, Professor Ding Xueliang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology stated that the army of unemployed mainland university students could reach 30 million. After discussions with teachers from mainland Chinese universities and economic media professionals, it was revealed that the actual employment rate for 2024 university students was as low as 30% – 35%, far below the reported 55.5%. If the average employment rate is 30%, the total number of unemployed individuals is 28.055 million.
Observers believe that a large number of students and the public falling into unemployment may exacerbate the overall social unrest.