China’s graduate glut: millions of young people enter a job market with little use for them

Each year, millions more graduates are thrust into China’s already saturated jobs market. The situation for this year’s cohort, flooding into an increasingly crowded pool of applicants fighting for an insufficient number of positions, is arguably the bleakest yet.

Jasmine, a 22-year-old who studied accounting in Shanghai, is among this year’s record 12.7 million college graduates – a 480,000 increase on 2025. She expected to find a job as soon as she finished university, but has sent out about 150 CVs over the past month without success.

“It has been much harder than I imagined,” she says. “The lack of vacancies is one issue, and the competition is also intense, especially for jobs that offer weekends off and proper social insurance.”

While China’s jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds of 15.6% is comparable to the UK’s of 16.2% and the EU’s (15.1%), the country’s employment market is especially unforgiving for graduates grappling with the break-neck change taking place in the world’s second largest economy.

A growing number of China’s graduates, holding freshly minted humanities, arts and languages degrees, find there is little demand for their skills. Meanwhile, the country’s universities, rapidly overhauling their curriculums in response to China’s race to become a global leader in a slew of hi-tech industries, are culling “obsolete” degrees en masse.

With China’s graduates exceeding 10 million each year since 2022, a figure that is only growing, the issue’s scale is an exacerbating factor, with authorities tasked with finding meaningful work for the equivalent of a medium-sized European nation each year.

China’s youth employment has been a “persistent issue since 2020” which has “not meaningfully improved”, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) researcher, who did not wish to be named. The researcher says this trend was initially fuelled by China’s move towards a “productivity- and manufacturing-driven growth model” of high-value industries such as electric vehicles, batteries, semiconductors and robotics.

“As the economy shifted, a mismatch emerged between the skills being supplied by graduates and those demanded by the labour market,” the researcher says, adding that the problem has been exacerbated more recently by AI’s “transformative impact”.

“Entry-level jobs are often easier to automate or replace, making young workers particularly vulnerable,” the researcher says. “Even graduates with backgrounds in IT services have seen some entry-level tasks increasingly automated by AI.”

While the move towards AI- and tech-focused degrees is a universal trend, the speed at which it is unfolding in China’s universities is unique, according to Charles Jeffery Sun, the founder of the consultancy China Education International.

“China’s higher education is centrally governed. When Beijing sets a strategic direction, implementation across hundreds of universities happens rapidly,” he says.

In response to directives from Beijing for degrees to better match labour demands, Chinese universities culled 12,200 undergraduate programmes, mostly in the arts and humanities, between 2021 and 2025, while introducing 10,200 in emerging fields. It is a situation Sun describes as “painful for many graduates”, but part of a “long?overdue reckoning”.

“For decades, Chinese higher education was primarily about access, getting more students into university. The next phase must be about quality and relevance,” he says.

Further hindering the jobs market is China’s slowing economy, with Beijing adjusting its GDP growth target to the lowest since 1991 – a range of 4.5% to 5% – as it grapples with aggressive global tariffs, weak domestic consumption, and a shrinking and rapidly ageing population.

China has not published nationwide statistics on graduate employment rates in recent years, meaning the issue’s true scale remains unknown. But Sun describes the situation as “severe” and the underlying numbers as “stark”.

“When accounting for previous cohorts still jobseeking, postgraduates who have not secured employment, and returning overseas graduates, the total pool of jobseekers [this year] may exceed 15 million,” he says.

Informal polls taken by recent graduates on China’s TikTok equivalent Xiaohongshu, asking their peers about their employment status, paint a bleak picture. One held in June by a 2025 graduate, featuring more than 14,000 respondents, featured more than 10,000 saying they were still unemployed. Another poll found 3,317 of 4,637 respondents selecting “unemployed since graduating, feeling aimless, lost and anxious” as their situation.

Underneath those numbers is a groundswell of despair, increasingly evident even on China’s heavily censored social media platforms, where the term “graduation means unemployment” has become a common refrain. “Someone please save me!” one 26-year-old graduate recently wrote about their unsuccessful job search. “I’m crying, I’m exhausted, I’m silent, I’ve surrendered.”

Graduates often face a choice between demanding jobs and long hours in the private sector, where 12-hour days and weekend shifts are common, and worse-paid but stable jobs in China’s ultra-competitive civil service. Fan, a 22-year-old who graduated from Sichuan University last month with a humanities degree, says there are very few jobs offering regular work hours and long-term stability.

“For most of us, looking for a job or going to work is very stressful,” he says. “If you work in a large company, you will be very anxious about being laid off in the future. You will also be very anxious about the pressure of all the tasks. If you work in a more stable [government] job, you will be anxious about not earning as much as others.”

Graduate unemployment appears to be a top concern for authorities, who have pushed several initiatives urging increased hiring, including a six-month national campaign launched this month. In March, authorities also signalled plans to harness AI to add 12 million urban jobs in 2026, including rolling out large-scale training programmes and internships in high-growth emerging sectors.

Sun says Beijing’s policy response has been “rational and proactive”, but the “structural issues will take time” to resolve. “I believe the trend [of graduate unemployment] is worsening in the short term, but may stabilise in the medium term as structural adjustments take effect,” he says.

For now, a growing number of degree holders are turning to flexible work, like delivery driving, as part of China’s vast gig economy that employs more than 200 million people. The EIU researcher says the gig economy provides important income opportunities, but it “may lead to long-term skill depreciation, lower income growth, and reduced career progression”.

“Policy responses will be important in helping workers adapt and ensuring that the transition does not result in lasting skill and income losses for a generation of young people,” they say.

But time is of the essence for millions of young Chinese. Fan says he can’t see any “particularly good solution” to China’s youth unemployment problem, but maintains hope the “future environment will be better”.

“I don’t know exactly when that will happen. I also don’t know what to do about the future,” he says. “I can only accept the reality.”

Additional reporting by Yu-chen Li