Correlative Study On Social Capital And University Student Employment In Western Region

The employment problem is always a significant but unavoidable issue in the modern society. With the reform towards policy of college entrance examination conducted by China in the late 1990s, higher education gradually popularize and college students are no longer scarce resources of society. On the contrary, due to continuously expanding enrollment, university graduates have become the main force of employment market.As an important concept in the field of scientific research, social capital has obtained attention from foreign and domestic scholars since it was put forward by French sociologist Bourdieu in the 1970s. Moreover, foreign scholars including Lin Nan, Mark Granovetter and Burt have carried out correlative study on the influence of social capital on job search behaviors. Meanwhile, domestic scholars like Bian Yanjie have compared the connection of social capital and job hunting. What is more, some people even make researches on social capital of laid-off workers, which shows that social capital can exert impacts on job hunting in some aspects.The paper adopts the data from "2012 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey" and selects 251 cases that conform to study condition as the research samples. By taking human capital and social capital of university students as independent variables as well as the most important four indicators including the job search channels, job information sources, unit type of job search and job satisfaction as dependent variables, the paper adopts SPSS statistical software for regression analysis, in which:Education background is a must-have condition of entering workplace, while bachelor degree plays an important role in the selection of employment channels.Social capital exerts vital influence on the selection of information sources for university student employment, but the emotion supporting network has a negative effect on students who utilize social relations to collect job information. However, numbers of people to discuss important things with and social and family status can positively affect the sources of job information. Namely, respondents with higher family status tend to collect employment information through social relations. In another word, the more people respondents possess to discuss important things with, the more willing they gather job information from acquaintances.Besides, social capital will affect the unit type of job hunting of college students, namely if possessing more people to discuss important things with, the respondents will be more inclined to the institutional unit, such as public institution, party, government and military agency and state-owned enterprise. Due to the effect of structural holes, the larger the support network scale of discussing significant matters is, the easier college students of entering institutional framework will be.