Recently, I saw a news about a bank in China recruiting tellers and customer managers. Surprisingly, many of the candidates who went for interviews were 985 and 211 graduate students, and there were even returnee master’s students like those from the University of London rushing to apply for teller positions. It should be noted that 10 years ago, undergraduate students could enter banks at will, and 15 years ago, it was not uncommon for college students to enter banks. However, in just a decade or so, the situation has completely changed, and the rate of academic depreciation has completely exceeded our phenomenon.

I have warned everyone a long time ago not to be obsessed with becoming a college student, because the future employment situation for ordinary college students is really severe. However, many people do not believe it. They insist that going to college is like being a proud child of heaven. To say such things is like ‘there are always troublemakers who want to harm me’.

But in fact, this is not my opinion anymore, but an ironclad fact. If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look at a few sets of data together:

According to statistics, there will be a total of 11.79 million college graduates in China in 2024, approximately equivalent to the population of a medium-sized European country. How can society digest such a large number of graduates?

The answer is that 3.88 million people choose to take the postgraduate entrance examination, and this year’s national plan to recruit approximately 1.24 million graduate students, which means 2.64 million people will ultimately fail the exam.

Since the postgraduate entrance examination is not feasible, let’s take the civil service examination. However, the civil service examination is even more challenging. This year, the number of applicants for the national examination reached 3.03 million, but the final number of hires was only 39000, with an employment digestion rate of only about 1/100. This means that on average, only one person out of every 100 applicants can stand out. Can you imagine what kind of competitive pressure this is?

Since both of the above paths are not feasible, let’s just graduate and apply for jobs in the society. However, everyone is aware of this year’s employment situation. According to statistics from Zhilian Recruitment, the employment rate for college students in 2024 is only an astonishing 55%. This means that regardless of the quality of the job or the salary, even if you are just a bricklayer or a screw driver, adding all of these jobs together can break through the level of about 50%.

Those who think it’s easy for college students to find jobs and earn over ten thousand yuan a month after graduation must be ignorant of the outside world, or their thinking is still stuck in the past ten or twenty years.

I know many people will be very confused. Why did I study hard for more than ten years, devote all the energy and financial resources of my whole family to go to college, but in the end, I couldn’t even find a better job?

The reasons are actually very complex, with the first and foremost being the serious disconnect between school education and social needs.

To put it more directly, what is learned in school is completely useless after leaving the school gate. This is a common problem in most universities in China today. As for why this phenomenon occurs? There is a very important reason, which is the mechanism of transmission from top to bottom in China.

When it is discovered that there is an urgent shortage of talent in a certain field, such as the chip industry, they will hold a meeting to study and issue a document called “Notice on Supporting the Development of the Semiconductor Chip Industry”. This approach was originally very reasonable, and we could not identify any problems.

After receiving the central government’s instructions, the education department will consider how to implement them. Their biggest possibility is to assign tasks to local governments and urge universities to quickly establish relevant disciplines. There is no problem with this step.

But if you ask universities to offer an additional discipline, it involves funding issues. In order to encourage universities to respond actively, the education department may propose corresponding incentive measures, such as offering schools with semiconductor related majors to receive 50% more education funding. Only in this way can universities have the motivation to implement and execute.

As soon as they heard that money can be obtained, many universities chose to offer semiconductor related majors. Even if there were no professional teachers in the school, they dared to establish their brand first and quickly recruit students from outside. As a result, many students were confused and transferred to the semiconductor major of a certain wild chicken university, starting their own difficult four-year life.

After graduating from college for four years, they discovered two serious problems:

One reason is that during my four years in college, I didn’t seem to learn anything practical, because the teachers were really not good at it, and I had no relevant industry experience. In class, I simply followed the theory.

Another reason is that major universities have opened semiconductor majors on a large scale, resulting in a large number of college graduates that year. After four years of development, the semiconductor industry may have long been saturated and no longer need so many people.

So, this group of graduates became the group of people who became unemployed upon graduation, confused and confused.

In addition to this reason, to be honest, there is another very core reason, which is that many college students nowadays do not make full use of their four years in college.

In some top 985 and 211 universities, the learning atmosphere may still be very strong, such as Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Many majors have a curriculum intensity comparable to high school, and the students there also have a strong spirit of exploration. There are also many people who study hard in the library self-study room. After staying in such a university for a few years, their learning ability and willpower will be significantly improved.

In the vast majority of second and third tier universities in China, skipping classes, playing games in dormitories, and focusing on dating as the core task are very common. Students there jokingly say that university is “played by you for four years”. Some students even start doing various social part-time jobs at the beginning of their college years, and eventually turn them into full-time jobs without attending classes or running sales every day. There are also a very small number of students who have never left the university dormitory, have their classes answered by others, plagiarize in exams, and rely on roommates for meals. We ask ourselves with our conscience, do you think graduates like this have the ability to find a high paying job?

So although the words may sound harsh, they are indeed a fact. Many students in Chinese universities, whether in terms of knowledge reserves, vision recognition, or professional skills, cannot meet the level required by society, and the inability to find good jobs is also causally related.

Of course, in addition to the two reasons I mentioned above, the reason why it is difficult for college students to find employment now is ultimately due to the exaggerated speed of university enrollment expansion.

In 2000, the number of college graduates was 950000.

In 2024, this number will become 11.79 million people.

In just 24 years, the number of graduates has increased 13 times.

The consequence of doing so is that the number of people in China with a university degree is constantly increasing. Currently, the population with a university education (college degree or above) in China has reached 15.4%, which is about 215 million people. In the future, there will be a continuous increase of 12 million people every year. At this rate, it will not be long before every young person in China is a college student. Friends who have studied economics know that no matter what industry it is, once the supply exceeds demand, the price of goods will immediately become a cabbage. Today’s college students are like Chinese cabbage that is crazily falling in price. Although it may sound harsh, it is indeed a fact.

I know some people will definitely raise doubts, but every country is facing a similar situation. Why isn’t the devaluation of academic qualifications as prominent in other countries?

I will tell you this question from two perspectives.

Firstly, there is also a very serious phenomenon of educational devaluation in other countries.

For example, in Japan, after the large-scale expansion of graduate enrollment in the 1990s, there was a significant devaluation of graduate education, leading to an employment ice age around 2000. At that time, the employment rate of graduate students in private universities in Japan was only 60%, and over 40% of Japanese graduate students became unemployed upon graduation.

There is also a similar situation in South Korea, where a highly competitive education system has produced a large number of doctoral students. However, South Korea’s industry cannot provide as many high paying positions, which ultimately leads to a large number of South Korean doctoral students working in low threshold jobs. For example, a materials science PhD in Seoul was exposed to work in a milk tea shop, with a monthly income that could only sustain their basic expenses.

This situation is very common in South Korea, as almost everyone can go to college, everyone is a college student, and many job positions only require skills. Ordinary college students know they are not competitive, so their job requirements are also very low. However, Korean doctoral students are unwilling to lower their value, which leads to them not even being able to compete with ordinary college students in interviews, and ultimately they can only go to convenience stores or milk tea shops to do odd jobs.

And this is not just a problem for Japan, South Korea, and us. Education is also severely devalued in Europe and the United States. One of the founders of Apple, Wozniak, once said, ‘I looked at the experience and education required to work at Apple now, and I think it’s difficult for both Steve Jobs and me to find a job at Apple now.’.

You see, the devaluation of education is not just our problem, it is a serious issue in countries around the world. This is the first perspective on this issue.

Next is the second perspective I want to share with you, which is that although other countries also experience a devaluation of educational qualifications, the situation is not as sharp as ours domestically.

The reasons are complex, but there is a very crucial reason, which is that China’s development speed is too fast. There is a saying that goes, China has completed the path taken by developed countries in 100 years in 30 years. This sentence not only refers to the speed of economic development, but also the speed of talent cultivation. We only spent more than 20 years to reserve the total number of engineers in Western countries for more than 100 years.

This has made us very dominant in the competition between countries, but it has caused a very obvious consequence, which is that the progress of social ideology cannot keep up with the speed of economic development.

To put it more vividly, Western countries have also experienced the devaluation of education, but they can accept their children becoming blue collar workers calmly, because it may take them 50-100 years to complete this ideological transformation, which is almost the life cycle of one generation. When the previous generation dies collectively, the next generation will undergo a ideological transformation according to the social situation. They can gradually accept the objective reality that blue collar workers are also good jobs.

But in our country, many parents cannot accept this change at all, because more than 20 years ago, they had just shaken off their identity as blue collar workers and successfully entered the office. However, after their children graduated from university, they had to go back to the old path and become blue collar workers. They found it difficult to accept such an objective reality.

When such ideas form a social consensus, it will create a very magical scene in China. On one hand, college graduates earn a monthly salary of 3500 yuan, and a large number of people are rushing to work. On the other hand, factories hire people with a monthly salary of 6000 yuan but no one is interested. When resources are seriously mismatched, it will make the employment problem for college students even more severe.

Of course, I know someone will tell me that I don’t go to the factory because of the working environment, which is indeed the case. This is also the sequelae that I pointed out. The rapid economic development is not only a problem of ideological transformation, but also the adjustment of legal system and social welfare cannot keep up with the new situation. To put it simply, improving the working environment of blue collar workers may take about 30-50 years, but now we have encountered this problem after more than 20 years of development, which has led to many conflicts erupting prematurely and appearing very magical.

This is the core contradiction that makes it difficult for Chinese college students to find employment today.

On the one hand, they know that becoming a white-collar worker after graduating from college is highly competitive and the salary is still low.

On the other hand, due to factors such as public opinion, work environment, and compensation, it is difficult for them to choose to become blue collar workers.

So the dilemma of not being able to move up or down and having difficulty making a decision has led to an awkward situation, which is currently the most difficult problem for college students to solve.