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Tough job market teaches China´s graduates a lesson in life

"Getting into the right sector is more important to me than everything else," Xia says.

Xiong Bingqi says the government and society must do more than telling students to lower their expectations.

A disdain for laboring or grassroots positions, usually less "decent" and with poor social security, is not only the students' only problem.

"In the long term, the government should cut college education costs, re-adjust university curricula to more practical subjects, improve the social security system, and help people form a more rational attitude to different jobs," he says.

But many college students believe the fierce job competition has already forced them to make concessions, abandoning dreams of scholarships abroad in favor of finding a stable, but possibly uninteresting, job.

Sang Zimao, a Laotian major at Beijing Foreign Studies University, is considering declining three offers from British colleges if he passes the interview for a civil service post.

Sang, 23, has been striving to study in Britain for two years, taking intensive English courses and planning to study international relations.

The change came in January, after he survived the first written test for national civil servant positions, which 90 percent of applicants failed. He then fought all the way into the final interview phase.

"Finding a good job is so difficult. If I can get one now, why not keep it?" he says.

But sooner or later, the graduates must come face to face with reality.

Chen Yongli, director of the Peking University Student Career Center, says more graduates have applied for grassroots positions in rural areas this year.

Yan Ju admits that if she can't find "a preferred job" by June, she will consider "something I can do", such as the hotel's offer.

"I'm practical, and I won't leave myself unemployed without trying any possibility."

( By Xinhua writer Wu Chen)

 

Editor:Zhang Ning

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