Many degrees of employment

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By Ma Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-29 07:53

If getting a job has become a problem for university graduates, creating new ones for them has been giving sleepless nights to policymakers. Since the number of students seeking higher education began rising drastically in 1999, university graduates have found it more difficult to find jobs they deserve. In mid-2008, when the economy was going strong, nearly one million graduates, or about one in every five, failed to get job.

This year, when nearly 6.11 million graduates have to hunt for jobs under austere economic conditions, something weird has emerged. According to Nanfang Metropolis News, a college graduate in Shaanxi province shared online on July 12 his experience of "getting hired unwittingly". He was surprised to find a "college graduate employment agreement" with a company's stamp in his personal files. More surprisingly, he had never heard of the company. His roommate, too, got a similar agreement from another unknown employer.

The Shaanxi graduate's posting on the Internet drew an overwhelming response, with many netizens saying they had undergone the same experience. Some fresh graduates even said they had been forced by their universities to provide employment contracts before getting their diplomas. Others complained that their universities had fabricated their employment agreements.

Their experiences make it clear that there exists a racket to fake documents in order to raise the employment rate of some universities' graduates. Universities manipulate figures to show that their graduates have good employment prospects, and thus lure high school students.

The human resources and social security authorities recently said this happens only in a very small number of universities, and the fraud will be dealt with strictly.

Even if this is a rare phenomenon, investigations should still be carried out to find out the truth. Employment prospects could sway the decisions of students seeking admission to a university. False employment rates projected by universities to attract students could jeopardize their future in more ways than one. It not only creates false employment hopes for future graduates, but also is draining resources because the end result is far from satisfactory.

These universities make a mockery of the regulation that ties employment with enrollment, issued by the Ministry of Education in 2006 to check the reckless increase in enrollments for higher education courses. The regulation says universities that churn out graduates having great difficulty in finding jobs have to restrict their admissions. Universities have to stop expanding, or even scrap, departments whose graduates struggle to land on a job. A few provinces have even set exact thresholds of employment rates, and special subjects and/or departments that fail to meet them have to be trimmed or abolished.

Despite the benign nature of the national and provincial regulations, a number of universities have chosen not to follow them and ignored improving the quality of education to suit the requirements of the job market. Some have even responded by providing bogus work contracts to students in exchange for diplomas.

The harm that such false contracts cause to the socio-economic firmament is immense. For example, the false high rate of graduates' employment could affect the government's decisions on education and employment policies.

At the end of last year, Premier Wen Jiabao declared that one of the top priorities of the government was to boost the job market for graduates. The government has made great efforts to create new jobs for graduates. For example, it has encouraged State-owned enterprises and institutes to create more jobs for college graduates, offer allowances to people who choose to work in outlying regions and provide small preferential loans to those who wish to start up businesses.

Employment policies, however, have to be based on authentic statistics. The bogus high employment rate projected by some universities may disguise the real situation and give rise to unnecessary optimism.

Fake employment figures could deceive potential students, and result in disproportionate allocation of resources in the education sector. Such figures help to hide the fact that some special subjects and universities that enroll them offer false hopes. Some of these subjects, according to the regulation, should have been scrapped so that the resources could be diverted to subjects and universities that offer better job prospects. They could force students to spend their families' resources for four years on subjects that are likely to fetch them frustration rather than jobs.

Besides, fudging employment figures will help universities to churn out graduates that have not been imparted the necessary knowledge and skills to compete in the real job market. Instead, they will teach them how cheating can bring in success. And that is not the best knowledge a graduate should enter the wider society with.

It's time employment figures provided by universities were subjected to strict scrutiny. Officials in charge of education could employ third parties, such as survey agencies, to get independent and credible information on the employment rate of university graduates. Plus, the authorities should subject colleges and universities committing such frauds to strict punishment.

Moreover, the employment rate of graduates leaving college is not the best way to gauge their employment rate. It would be better if the authorities began measuring graduates' employment rate a year, or two to three years, or even longer after graduation.

(China Daily 07/29/2009 page8)