• Home
  • Politics
  • Health
  • World
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
What's Hot

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Thursday, May 8
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
  • Home
  • Politics

    Security video shows brazen sexual assault of California woman by homeless man

    October 24, 2023

    Woman makes disturbing discovery after her boyfriend chases away home intruder who stabbed him

    October 24, 2023

    Poll finds Americans overwhelmingly support Israel’s war on Hamas, but younger Americans defend Hamas

    October 24, 2023

    Off-duty pilot charged with 83 counts of attempted murder after allegedly trying to shut off engines midflight on Alaska Airlines

    October 23, 2023

    Leaked audio of Shelia Jackson Lee abusively cursing staffer

    October 22, 2023
  • Health

    Disparities In Cataract Care Are A Sorry Sight

    October 16, 2023

    Vaccine Stocks—Including Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech And Novavax—Slide Amid Plummeting Demand

    October 16, 2023

    Long-term steroid use should be a last resort

    October 16, 2023

    Rite Aid Files For Bankruptcy With More ‘Underperforming Stores’ To Close

    October 16, 2023

    Who’s Still Dying From Complications Related To Covid-19?

    October 16, 2023
  • World

    New York Democrat Dan Goldman Accuses ‘Conservatives in the South’ of Holding Rallies with ‘Swastikas’

    October 13, 2023

    IDF Ret. Major General Describes Rushing to Save Son, Granddaughter During Hamas Invasion

    October 13, 2023

    Black Lives Matter Group Deletes Tweet Showing Support for Hamas 

    October 13, 2023

    AOC Denounces NYC Rally Cheering Hamas Terrorism: ‘Unacceptable’

    October 13, 2023

    L.A. Prosecutors Call Out Soros-Backed Gascón for Silence on Israel

    October 13, 2023
  • Business

    Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

    May 8, 2025

    Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

    May 7, 2025

    Tyson Foods Announces It Will Bend The Knee To Trump Admin’s New Rules

    May 7, 2025

    Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady Despite Pressure From Trump

    May 7, 2025

    ‘Wait Them Out’: John Kennedy Tells Larry Kudlow One Lie He Suspects China’s Telling US

    May 7, 2025
  • Finance

    Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

    April 17, 2025

    The Trump Tariff Shock Should Push Indonesia to Reform Its Economy

    April 17, 2025

    Tariff Talks an Opportunity to Reinvigorate the Japan-US Alliance

    April 17, 2025

    How China’s Companies Are Responding to the US Trade War

    April 16, 2025

    The US Flip-flop Over H20 Chip Restrictions 

    April 16, 2025
  • Tech

    Cruz Confronts Zuckerberg on Pointless Warning for Child Porn Searches

    February 2, 2024

    FTX Abandons Plans to Relaunch Crypto Exchange, Commits to Full Repayment of Customers and Creditors

    February 2, 2024

    Elon Musk Proposes Tesla Reincorporates in Texas After Delaware Judge Voids Pay Package

    February 2, 2024

    Tesla’s Elon Musk Tops Disney’s Bob Iger as Most Overrated Chief Executive

    February 2, 2024

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth Grew $84 Billion in 2023 as Pedophiles Target Children on Facebook, Instagram

    February 2, 2024
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
Home»Finance»A Higher Education Bubble Stretches China’s Blue-Collar Economy
Finance

A Higher Education Bubble Stretches China’s Blue-Collar Economy

July 19, 2023No Comments5 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
A Higher Education Bubble Stretches China’s Blue-Collar Economy
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email
Advertisement

Despite China’s recovery from the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic, the headline jobless rate for young workers between the ages of 16 and 24 remains unnervingly high. In May, youth unemployment edged to 20.8 percent, a new record.

With a record number of 11.58 million students graduating college this summer, the stress is set to worsen.

This gap between a broad, albeit slowing, economic rebound and persistent pressure on youth employment reflects a structurally imbalanced labor market. It is the outcome of a relentless push to expand college education in China that far outpaced economic reform. Without parallel growth in service industries that attract college graduates, the surplus of tertiary degree holders will continue to dampen productivity.

The irony is that the most educated generation in China’s modern history now looks set to become an increasing burden for the country, misplaced in an economy struggling to absorb them. This should not be a surprise, however, because the main rationale driving the college expansion was never really about the utility of education itself.

Rather than a calculated move to transform the workforce, Beijing’s decision in 1999 to substantially expand higher education was chiefly a response to weakened export markets.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.

The leadership used new campus constructions to spur domestic demand in the face of the Asian Financial Crisis. Universities’ need for land and facilities made them the preferred stimulus conduit in the years preceding China’s infrastructure-building frenzy.

Higher education was also a way to divert high school graduates from an already squeezed job market, given that Beijing was simultaneously undertaking large-scale layoffs from state-owned enterprises to prepare for entry into the World Trade Organization.

See also  Billionaire Mark Mobius says he's so bullish on emerging markets that all his money is outside the US

While signs had already emerged in the early 2000s that recent college graduates would struggle to find suitable jobs, efforts to scale up higher education went into overdrive.

Advertisement

Throughout the decade, the “marketization of education” policy reduced the government’s budgetary outlays for universities, prompting schools to seek profits and raise tuitions.

By the late 2000s, financing the expansion had saddled many universities with heavy debts. But college enrollment was now effectively a measure of political success for local officials. For underprivileged rural populations, education was their ticket to social mobility.

The political logic behind the expansion overwhelmed other considerations. As a result, the acceptance rate among post-secondary institutions in China soared from 33 percent in 1998 to over 92 percent in 2021. Enrollment rates for tertiary education went from just 26.5 percent in 2010 to just under 60 percent in 2022. By comparison, the college enrollment rate for students with high school diplomas in the United States remained at around 40 percent throughout the 2010s.

The higher education boom sharpened the competition for a finite pool of urban white-collar jobs in management and professional services, despite these fields remaining marginal to China’s economic growth.

Regional inequality and enduring Confucian beliefs about manual labor being inappropriate for the educated class also reinforced the preference for office work in large cities, notwithstanding China’s socialist status.

Thus, Beijing’s proven record of salvaging growth by bolstering manufacturing and industrial output has generally not provided sufficient opportunities befitting the expectations of college graduates. The prescription expands factory floors and construction sites – not exactly where the educated young think they belong.

See also  Traders Rushing to Undo Massive Bets Whipsaw Gas Prices

In 2021, excluding the agriculture-based primary sector, the share of national employment in blue-collar jobs was still around 70 percent, according to official numbers.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.

To address this shortage of corporate jobs, the government must support a relatively underdeveloped service sector.

The World Bank reports that in 2021, service businesses accounted for 53 percent of the annual GDP in the country. That is lower than the world average of 64 percent and far below the 78 percent in the United States. China’s perennial trade deficits in services reflect this comparative disadvantage.

Although services have become the largest source of employment in China since 2011, the progress was largely driven by customer-focused divisions such as delivery and ride-hailing. These are informal, labor-intensive gigs that college graduates likewise tend to eschew.

Advertisement

Recent policy shocks have exacerbated the structural mismatch. Before the pandemic, with decent growth prospects and ample demand for knowledge workers, companies in the platform economy, after-school tutoring, and real estate development used to recruit fresh graduates in droves, tempering the youth unemployment stress to an extent. But all three industries have contracted significantly, having been the target of regulatory tightening in the past two years, and the employment path forward has narrowed further.

Meanwhile, the state’s grip on key parts of the economy is a hurdle to harnessing the educated workforce.

More than 1 million students, for example, obtained a bachelor’s degree in finance each year from 2018 to 2020, according to China’s Ministry of Education. But China’s state bank-dominated financial system lacks the diversity of its Western counterparts, where non-bank institutions play a vital role in raising capital for companies large and small.

See also  China's Baidu scraps public launch for ChatGPT-like product

With onerous restrictions on foreign and private firms, the financial field is too guarded to create enough opportunities for the legions of young aspirants. Moreover, the deleveraging campaign amid economic headwinds has forced Chinese banks to face default risks, weak credit demand, and profit losses, all of which hampered their ability to hire.

The fierce competition for white-collar positions is also out of step with national economic imperatives, given the growing rivalry with the United States. For the Chinese leadership, technological self-reliance calls for fast industrial modernization. Washington’s embrace of muscular industrial policies has further cemented Beijing’s own determination to foster advanced manufacturing as a strategic mainstay.

To that end, Beijing is ramping up investment in vocational schools to cultivate skilled laborers to make hardware, manage sophisticated machineries, and oversee increasingly automated assembly lines.

But this threatens to become a “race to the bottom” driven by state intervention, which risks sapping the service sector’s vitality even more. If that turns out to be the case, the economy will continue to have inadequate demand for those trained in humanities and financial markets, despite their supposedly valuable college degrees.

BlueCollar bubble Chinas Economy Education higher Stretches
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

‘Wait Them Out’: John Kennedy Tells Larry Kudlow One Lie He Suspects China’s Telling US

May 7, 2025

China’s Export Economy Under Trump’s Tariff Onslaught The Worst Since COVID

April 30, 2025

US Economy Contracts In First Quarter Of 2025

April 30, 2025

Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

April 17, 2025
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Posts

Why Anemia Highly Prevalent Among Women In The Global South

August 1, 2023

Hispanic, Latino Actors and Filmmakers Still Left Behind By Hollywood USC Study Says

November 7, 2023

Covid No Longer A Global Health Emergency: World Health Organisation

May 5, 2023

Why Vietnam Agreed to Supply the Philippines with Rice For Five Years

February 7, 2024
Don't Miss

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

Business May 8, 2025

President Donald Trump announced Thursday the U.S. has reached a trade agreement with the U.K.,…

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025

Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

May 7, 2025
About
About

This is your World, Tech, Health, Entertainment and Sports website. We provide the latest breaking news straight from the News industry.

We're social. Connect with us:

Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest
Categories
  • Business (4,110)
  • Entertainment (4,220)
  • Finance (3,202)
  • Health (1,938)
  • Lifestyle (1,626)
  • Politics (3,084)
  • Sports (4,036)
  • Tech (2,006)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • World (3,944)
Our Picks

‘The FBI Has Nothing To Stand On’: Rep. Byron Donalds Calls Out DOJ For ‘Obstructing Justice’

July 21, 2023

Vanessa Bryant Reaches Nearly $29 Million Settlement with Los Angeles County Over Kobe Bryant Crash Photos

March 8, 2023

Morgan Wallen’s 2-Year-Old Son Goes to ER for Dog Bite — Mother Begs to Save Pet from Being Put Down

June 22, 2023
Popular Posts

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
© 2025 Patriotnownews.com - All rights reserved.
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.