According to a Xinhua report, the Ministry of Education said today that by then end of September, of the 5 million students who graduated in July of this year, 1.44 million were still unemployed.Last year at this time there were 1.24 million unemployed recent graduates.It isn’t clear from the article if the rise in the number of unemployed students was caused by fewer jobs offered or more students graduating.
I would guess that rising unemployment among college students has to be one of the things that worries anyone concerned about social stability.I suppose that it will increase pressure for the authorities to avoid doing anything that might slow employment growth in the medium term.As China’s financial markets become more efficient at allocating capital, there should be a positive impact on the market’s ability to generate good jobs for college graduates, but until then let’s hope that student expectations about job prospects don’t turn negative.
As an aside one of my former Tsinghua students who graduated two years ago and went to work for China Mobile came by my office to see me today.He told me that he and one of his classmates had just quit their jobs to start a company that reads and tracks bar codes.They expect to sell their product to big retailers.They received about RMB 1 million (about $150 thousand) from a Taiwanese investor to use as their start-up capital, and in exchange the investor received 40% of the company.In one year, the investor may consider putting up another RMB 2-3 million (I don’t know on what terms).The company currently has ten employees.It doesn’t take a lot of money in China to fund a start-up.
The same Xinhua report said that of the recently graduated college students that found jobs this year, a little less than one-half of 1% started their own businesses.
Michael Pettis is a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He has also taught, from 2002 to 2004, at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and, from 1992 to 2001, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the board of directors of ABC-CA Fund Management Co., a Sino-French joint venture based in Shanghai.
Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.
Pettis is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of several books, including The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economies and the Threat of Financial Collapse (Oxford University Press, 2001). He received an MBA in Finance in 1984 and an MIA in Development Economics in 1981, both from Columbia University.
Subscribe to this Site
Comments for "College unemployment"
October, 2007
.