On February 26, the results of the 2024 postgraduate entrance examination and the national line in many places began to be announced one after another. Although the number of applicants for the exam has dropped for the first time in eight years, the acceptance rate is expected to not exceed 30%, and the competition is still fierce.
Behind the fact that they know that there is a high probability of running with them and want to devote themselves to it, many people have this understanding of academic qualifications: undergraduates have no advantage in finding a job, and working hard to study for graduate school may have a better way out.
Are academic qualifications really inflationary? To answer this question, The Paper analyzed the 2010 and 2020 China Family Panel Survey, which was conducted by the China Social Science Survey Center at Peking University to reflect changes in China's economy, education, and other fields.
If you look at it directly from a salary perspective, the salaries of college graduates in 2020 have at least doubled compared to a decade ago, regardless of academic qualifications. To this end, we have set up the concept of "salary advantage index", that is, to compare the annual income of the working population with the per capita disposable income of the whole country in that year.
In this way, it can be intuitively seen that from 2010 to 2020, among the respondents with a bachelor's degree, the overall job salary advantage within 3 years of graduation has disappeared significantly, from 189 down to 133。
How to understand this decline in the salary advantage index? For example, in the "China Family Tracking Survey", the same bachelor's degree was done as an accountant, and in the 2010 survey, a student who graduated in 2008 had an annual salary of 15,000 yuan, which was equivalent to 1 percent of the per capita disposable income of that year2x. In the survey ten years later, another student who graduated in 2019 earned an annual salary of 33,285 yuan after working for one year, but compared with the national per capita disposable income of 32,189 yuan that year, the advantage was very weak.
If a bachelor's degree is a slight advantage in finding a job, by 2020, college students as a whole no longer have any salary advantage. The average working income of respondents with a college degree within 3 years of graduation was only 96% of the per capita disposable income of residents.
Compared with junior college and undergraduate, the salary advantage index of master's degree within 3 years of graduation is relatively better. In 2010, the working income of master's students within 3 years of graduation was equivalent to 334 times, while in 2020, this figure slipped slightly to 319 times.
When did a high degree ≠ a high income?
To the surprise of many, the "depreciation of academic qualifications" in China began earlier than we thought. According to the analysis of the "National Survey on the Employment Status of College Graduates" by the Institute of Educational Economics of Peking University, since 2007, the overall salary advantage of college graduates relative to those employed in urban units has begun to decline.
The slow fading of this advantage can be understood as one of the results of China's higher education moving from elite education to mass education after the expansion of university enrollment. In 2000, there were about 950,000 college graduates in the country, and now the scale is more than 10 million. For the job market, supply and demand fundamentally determine the employment prospects of college students.
The most typical representatives of this regard are Nordic, Japan, South Korea and other countries. In Norway, for example, the salary advantage of college graduates is not high due to the fact that universities are free and the admission rate is high: compared to high school graduates aged 25 to 34, the salary advantage index of college graduates of the same age is 107, almost the same as the former.
Similarly, in China, over the past 25 years, as the number of university students has expanded dramatically, the salary advantage has become a trend. First and foremost are the largest number of junior college students, whose starting salaries since 2017 are less than half of those of those employed in urban units. The salary advantage index of undergraduate graduates, although it is still greater than 1, is also declining.
The sentence "The more doctorates and masters, the better, the undergraduates, etc., don't look at the junior colleges" at the job fair, which also confirms the inflation of academic qualifications from the side.
Is there any other way to do it other than roll your degree?
In our analysis of college student employment salary data from 2010 to 2020, we also found a number of factors that may have influenced the depreciation of academic qualifications.
When we break down the data of the salary advantage index to the regional level, we are surprised to find that in the more economically developed eastern region, the overall salary advantage index of university graduates has fallen the most, followed by the central region. And in the Northeast and West, the salary advantage index for undergraduates has even appeared**.
Why is this happening? We believe that although there are many job opportunities in the eastern coastal provinces, the competition for fresh graduates here is more fierce than in the inland areas due to the large number of universities and graduates.
In 2020, the "Research Report on the Group of College Students with Employment Difficulties" jointly released by the Development Research Center, the China Development Research Association and other institutions showed that although the eastern region provided 513% of jobs are in demand, but 57 percent of college students submit resumes to the region0%。
The current situation of the oversupply of the talent market has accelerated the "depreciation of academic qualifications" in the eastern region. In these provinces, college students face stiffer competition if they want to find a good job.
In addition to geographical factors, career development direction is also an important factor affecting the salary of college students.
The following changes in the salary advantage index by industry show the changes of university education in different industries in the context of the decline in the overall employment advantage.
In the decade from 2010 to 2020, the Wage Advantage Index for the wholesale and retail sectors fell much more than the overall average, while the decline in information and communication, computer services, and software remained at a high level of 3, jumping from 5th place in 2010 to 1st place in 2020.
But the number of people who have the privilege of choosing the right track has always been a minority. Education and manufacturing don't rank well in the 2020 Salary Advantage Index for a variety of industries, but they have the highest percentage of college graduates going to work. According to the results of the National Survey on the Employment Status of College Graduates, education and manufacturing are the two industries with the highest proportion in the distribution of employment industries for college graduates in 2021.
However, this chart of the past does not give an accurate picture of the future, or even the present. Under the impact of new technologies such as AI, the global industry will face a major reshuffle. But it can remind us that at the moment of academic involution, postponing the promotion of academic qualifications means handing in the papers in advance, after all, it is not enough to blindly pursue high education, and it is very important to choose the right direction.
Expecting too much to improve academic qualifications in pursuit of job returns can be counterproductive.
It is not uncommon for high education to have "low" employment.
Every job hunting season, the news about highly-educated graduates entering low-threshold industries begins to stir up the public's nerves: "Zhongchuan post-95 post-master's degree graduates go to sell houses", "Tsinghua graduates do housekeeping", "Peking University female doctors become urban management" ......
Although there is no distinction between high and low occupations, the situation that cannot be ignored is that many college students have a question similar to this after graduating from work: Do you really need such a high degree to do this job?
The matching of an individual's actual education level and the education level required for a professional position can be divided into three types: insufficient education, educational adaptation and excessive education. By analyzing data from the 2020 China Family Panel Survey, we found that more than half of those with a bachelor's degree within three years of graduation felt that their jobs did not require a college degree.
In addition, some studies have also shown that the eastern region, which has the most abundant resources and the highest employment favor of college students, is the place where over-education is most likely to occur, that is, the "low" employment situation of high education is the most.
But I have to admit that although you can do a job without a high degree of education, it is difficult to find a job without a high degree of education.
According to the National Survey on the Employment Status of College Graduates, although the biggest factor affecting one's employment has always been the ability to work, the ranking of educational factors has gradually improved from 7th to 3rd between 2011 and 2021.
Due to the academic qualifications in job hunting and the high pressure of job competition, a survey conducted by China Youth Press in 2019 showed that more than half of the respondents felt that high education has become a social trend, and graduate students could not take the exam, and "improving their academic qualifications to find a job better" was the biggest reason for the postgraduate entrance examination.
But we published an article last year titled "1.14 Million Recruitment Data: Can Graduate School Entrance Examination Really Lead to Good Jobs?" Through the recruitment data, the advantages and disadvantages of studying for 3 years and working for 3 years after graduating from the undergraduate program found that in addition to the greater salary increase that graduate school in technical positions can bring more than the job, for graduate students in non-technical positions, the salary when looking for a job may not be as good as that of peers who have started working after graduating from undergraduate.
In addition to this, higher education can even be counterproductive when it comes to work. In the employment situation of "overkill", many people will have a sense of loss. According to our calculations, over-educators have the highest percentage of dissatisfaction with their jobs compared to under-education or educational adaptation.
Why is "low" employment with high education more likely to lead to job dissatisfaction?
On the one hand, over-educators face "income penalties." Research by Li Xiaoguang and Yao Yuan shows that among people with the same level of education, the average annual income of over-educated individuals is 84%。On the other hand, when over-educators evaluate their work, they will inevitably compare: compared with the people around them, why can't they earn less than those with low academic qualifications after going to school for half a day? Compared with himself, he has not been promoted in his work, and he has regressed more and more. Only with the passage of time and the change of mentality can we slowly reconcile with the work of "high learning and low learning".
It should be emphasized that over-education is only a perspective for comparing educational attainment and job demand, and does not mean that there is a surplus of higher education as a whole. In 1999, when the policy of expanding enrollment in higher education was implemented, China's gross enrolment ratio in higher education was 105%, and in 2022, the figure reaches 596%, achieving universal access to higher education, but there is still a gap compared with many developed countries. According to statistics, more than 50 countries and regions in the world have achieved universal access to higher education, and more than 10 countries and regions have achieved deep universalization, that is, the gross enrollment rate of higher education exceeds 80%.
Although the universalization of higher education has been completed, many people have not yet changed their mindset and set the first goal of learning to be academic qualifications, not competencies.
Rationally speaking, in the era of popularization of higher education, the 'depreciation of academic qualifications' is a general trend, and we should pay more attention to education itself. Xiong Bingqi, president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, once wrote an article in "Guangming**", "The transformation from a 'academic society' to a 'ability society' can only be accelerated, not stagnant." ”
After graduating with a master's degree in 95, many people are lamenting that they will work hard to become an agent in graduate school, and Yao Qinwen, the protagonist of the news, said very frankly: I originally went to the real estate agency store for internship after graduation, but after contact, I found that I liked this job very much. The experience of graduate school has taught her "how to learn" and allowed her to look at this job from the perspective of "a tool for taking people to see the house".
In the sea of life, have you experienced "education inflation"? Is there a way to get rid of it? Or are you still struggling to cope? Feel free to share in the comment section. (Intern Feng Songxuan, reporter Wei Yao, Chen Liangxian).
*: CCTV News).
Editor: Fu Ying].
*: The Paper].