Editor’s Note: The following translation is based on data gathered from a recent survey conducted by The Taiyuan Municipal Survey Team of the National Statistics Bureau. The survey only questioned students who study in second tier cities and as such, does not necessarily represent the view of students everywhere in China, especially those in the more prosperous first tier-cities.

With the increase of employment pressures on college graduates in recent years, students’ ideas about employment are quietly changing. The Taiyuan Municipal Survey Team of National Statistics Bureau just released the latest employment survey of college students. Compared with two years ago, the constant rising cost of living in large cities, coupled with the fact that increasing competition has diluted opportunities and extruded the space of development, more than 60% of graduates are choosing medium and small cities as their first choice to seek employment after graduation.

The increasingly difficult living conditions in large cities are making it difficult for many students to gain a firm foothold, which makes a more rational choice, such as looking for employment in smaller cities, more reasonable. The survey found that 63.3% of college graduates expect to find employment in small and medium sized cities. Only 18.3% of college graduates chose the economically developed large cities, and 18.4% of the students do not care about where they end up working as long as they have job satisfaction, some even willing to work in their small hometowns.
College students have also become more realistic about their salary expectations. According to the survey question asking about their expected starting salary, up to 75% of the students chose the 1000-2000 RMB range. This is 31.7 percentage points higher than the survey results from graduating college students from May this year. 25% of the students are expecting a pay of 2000-3000 RMB per month, while no one selected less than 1000 RMB or over 3000 RMB as their answer.
In fact the study finds that it’s personal development rather than payment that matters most when students choose work. According to the survey, 43% of the surveyed college students preferred "future development" when asked what their priorities for choosing employment are. For the same question, 24.1% of respondents chose "interests and aspirations", which is far greater than those that answered "salary" (13.9%), "a career that fits one’s major" (12.7%) and "location" (6.3%). Thus, graduates pay attention not only to their future personal development but also to their aspirations and personal interests when they choose their employer.
 

Source: edu.ifeng.com

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Keywords: college graduate medium small cities chinese college graduate survey college graduate employment