Earlier this year, in a humid city in China’s southern Guangxi province, a young woman opened a mango ice cream stand. Within weeks, the stall and its unlikely proprietor went viral online. But fame came at a cost.
The problem was that the young woman had a degree in medical imaging and her alma mater was not impressed. The institution demanded that she delete the video to avoid tarnishing its reputation. Initially she complied, before reposting it and inviting the university to sue her if it thought she was defaming it.
The backlash against Li struck a nerve in China because it underlined simmering ongoing tensions over what counts as a “successful” outcome in a job market under extreme pressure after years of precipitous growth.?
Nearly three years on from the Chinese government’s abolition of Covid restrictions in the wake of , the country’s post-pandemic slowdown, driven by a real estate crunch that has eaten into middle-class spending power, is showing few signs of improving. And that has had a serious effect on a graduate recruitment market that was already showing signs of strain amid unchecked university expansion during the country’s remarkable period of double-digit economic growth, fuelling a higher education enrolment rate that has reached .
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“From 1999 onwards, the Chinese higher education sector has experienced huge expansion,” said Tao Zhang, senior lecturer in international media and communications at Nottingham Trent University. “Year after year, an ever-increasing number of graduates were churned out. In 2025, the number is expected to reach around 12.22 million, up from 11.8 million in 2024 – a record high.”
This massification, once seen as a route to national prosperity, now risks producing a generation of disillusioned jobseekers, she argued. “The job market simply cannot absorb such a large number of graduates,” said Zhang. “It’s not just about the numbers – it’s also about the mismatch between what students are trained for and what the economy actually needs.”
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The issue has been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic, which hit China’s economy hard amid its long, draconian lockdowns. The country’s underlying GDP growth is now below the politically mandated 5 per cent, many experts believe, and youth unemployment has?grown?significantly – rising above 20 per cent before reporting was suspended in 2023 and revised to exclude students. July’s figure for urban 16-24-year-olds – the most recent published – was , compared with 6.9 per cent for 25- to 29-year-olds and 5.2 per cent for the urban population as a whole.
“Since the pandemic, China’s economic environment has become increasingly strained, with slowing growth and weak private sector recovery,” said Futao Huang, a professor in the Research Institute for Higher Education at Japan’s Hiroshima University, who was born and educated in China.
“At the same time, the rapid expansion of higher education enrolment over the past two decades has intensified competition among graduates, particularly in fields outside STEM,” he said.
A 2023 study found that more than one-third of Chinese graduates were working in graduate fields unrelated to their degrees – known as a “horizontal mismatch” – while nearly one in four were considered “vertically mismatched”, meaning they were significantly overqualified for the jobs they had.
More recent analyses indicate the trend has persisted: a by the Institute of Geoeconomics thinktank reported an oversupply of degree-holders competing for limited white-collar jobs, and surveys show many graduates are overeducated relative to the positions available.
That mismatch might seem curious given the state control exerted over Chinese universities, which are explicitly tasked by the government with preparing students for the labour market. Institutions are assessed on metrics such as graduates’ employment rate and job quality; more recently, the government has even introduced a “red-yellow card” system to flag academic programmes with persistently low graduate employment outcomes, giving regulators leverage to reform or shut them down.
But in some cases the emphasis on outcomes has led to misreporting and irregular practices, including allegedly withholding diplomas until job placements are confirmed. Moreover, universities’ room to innovate to keep up with quickly evolving labour markets?is constricted by the state diktats and central planning priorities by which they are bound, according to Huang – particularly as when these do shift, institutions have to scramble to comply with them.
“Universities cannot simply follow student demand or labour market trends – they are first accountable to the state,” Huang said.
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Some universities have nonetheless begun to respond to graduate un- and under-employment by aligning their curricula more closely with industry needs, particularly in areas such as AI, the digital economy and applied sciences. Internship programmes and entrepreneurship support are expanding, and vocational education has received a major government push.
In 2023, a government document claimed that representatives from more than 2,600 colleges and universities across the country visited more than 236,000 companies in?only?two months, creating more than 2.9 million jobs in “disciplines with low job placement rates”. Others have launched online training camps and invested in job fairs and one-to-one coaching to boost graduate employability.
More recently, in 2025, the Ministry of Education and other national authorities launched a 100-day employment campaign, requiring universities and local governments to expand job placement efforts and secure at least 100 opportunities per institution.
But boosting such short-term placements can be the limit of some universities’ ambitions on graduate employability, warned Yannan Cao, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, given the regulatory restrictions and the difficulty of affecting longer-term labour trends.
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“Universities can enhance employability to a degree, but they can’t resolve structural mismatches in the economy,” he said.
Further measures adopted by many institutions include more career services, mentoring for struggling graduates and expanding professional master’s programmes at the expense of academic tracks.
Students are also responding to a growing realisation that a degree is no longer a guarantee, in itself, of a prosperous career. They are increasingly choosing vocational degrees with stable employment prospects, such as teacher training or policing programmes, even over research degrees at prestigious universities, Cao said: “We’re seeing more pragmatic, individualised choices among high-achieving students.”
But while this “slow but visible erosion of uncritical faith in elite brands” within higher education might be expected to encourage more risk-taking and innovation by Chinese graduates, offering a potential economic boost to the nation, that impetus is offset by the social stigma that continues to weigh heavily on those who pursue non-traditional paths – as the reaction to the mango ice cream entrepreneur illustrates. Hiroshima’s Huang notes that Chinese culture still equates success with high-status employment in government or state-owned enterprises. “Non-traditional or lower-profile careers are often stigmatised,” he said.
Steve Fuller, the Auguste Comte Chair in social epistemology at the University of Warwick, who supervises Chinese PhD students, has observed first-hand the toll of such pressures on Chinese graduates.
“The government encouraged many to enter science and medical universities, promising cutting-edge opportunities,” he said. “Students were told they’d be at the forefront of AI, biotech, high-tech research – but the jobs just aren’t there in the numbers they were promised.”
The result is a growing sense of despair among graduates – so much so that “without social media distractions, many might commit suicide”, Fuller said. “Almost everyone I spoke to knows a young graduate who did.”
This is the context of the much-discussed phenomenon of “lying flat” (tang ping). Often mischaracterised outside China as laziness or disengagement, this attitude is best understood not as a literal withdrawal from the labour market but as a coping mechanism: a symbolic, cathartic refusal to keep striving in an environment where effort rarely delivers the promised rewards.
Nor is the picture any better for those who prefer to remain within academia. China’s vast expansion of its research capacity over recent decades has produced a huge number of doctoral graduates, vastly outnumbering the capacity even of an expanded academy to employ them. Fuller regularly hears stories of Chinese graduates forced to choose between hypercompetitive postdoc tracks or ideologically rigid jobs teaching Marxist theory. Even those who are competitive are often frustrated by shifting institutional standards within universities.
“Just when you think you’ve met a benchmark, they move the goalposts,” he said. “In China, you need to achieve certain things before you’re even qualified to apply for certain jobs. That constant change is demoralising.”
Despite the discontent, Fuller cautions against expecting any official reckoning. “The Chinese government won’t publicly admit there’s a crisis,” he said. “And Chinese universities, as arms of the state, aren’t going to push for radical change.”
Nevertheless, few experts expect China’s growth to return to the double-digit levels of the early 2000s, and, as in many other countries, the pressure on the country’s universities to take up the economic slack through cutting-edge research and the production of employable graduates is only likely to increase.
Ultimately, experts suggest that meaningful change requires more realistic planning and greater institutional autonomy. For his part, Fuller also argues for a greater diversity of tertiary pathways: the state should stop promoting university enrolment as a guaranteed path to high-end employment and instead invest in technical, vocational and adaptable forms of education, he believes.
Huang takes a similar view. “There’s no simple solution,” he said. “But if we continue to rely on the same model, we’ll continue to see the same disconnect – between graduate aspirations, institutional incentives and the realities of the job market.”
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Without some melting of China’s rigid educational policies and social expectations, then, ice cream may long remain one of the few consolations for those frozen out of traditional graduate careers.
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