First Occupation Attainment Of College Graduates:Influencing Factors And Obtaining Paths

The openness of status attainment is closely related to the level of economic and social development. Because of the common dream of "Education changes fate", The fairness of first occupation attainment for college graduates and its change have been paid critical concern by public and academic. Based on the typicality and particularity of college graduates’status attainment, this paper explores the mechanism of status attainment for the Chinese by studying the process of college graduates when they step into society.By adopting the method of quantitative research, the author collects data from611valid copies in the questionnaire survey in college graduates of Wuhan, Hubei Province from1992to2011. After the data analysis, the paper discusses the state and its change of college graduates’status attainment, and further verifies the fact that social relations are the mechanism for family’s social status reproduction. The whole paper comprises four parts in all:The first part gives a brief account of previous researches on status attainment, in which the divergence of existing researches, contributions of classical theories to the study of status attainment and the Chinese system background are elaborated. And then the research design and research hypotheses are presented. The second part discusses the factors affecting the first occupation attainment of college graduates and its open state based on the analysis of the statistical results of the collected data._Part three makes an analysis of the influence and change made by family background to the two key paths for first occupation attainment and by paths for first occupation attainment to the index of general occupational status. The last part is the summary on the major findings of this study and further discussions are provided.Major findings of this paper mainly include:First occupation attainment of college graduates is characterized by its openness from the year1992to2011, and in the wake of the popularization of higher education, it continues to grow under the dominance of openness and with the combined impact of self-actualized and congenital factors. Besides, the effect of family background on the general occupation status attainment has been enhanced. Family background has a great influence on the paths for first occupation attainment of college graduates, but not significantly increasing in time series. And the paths for first occupation attainment are closely related to index of systematic status and have been enhanced after the popularization of higher education.Openness in process and result are two aspects to know about first occupation attainment for college graduates. The former refers to the increasing dependence of index of general occupational status on the market, while its result is affected by family background; the latter indicates that systematic occupation status becomes more and more independent from the market, yet family background has no impact on its result. And the division of labor market is the important explanation of the two dimension features.Based on this, the construction of the college graduates’ employment market should pay attention to the process and the results of the two aspects of the promotion.