A Study On The Structure Of Supply And Demand In Academic Labor Market In China

Are the supply and demand of Chinese academic labor market surplus or insufficient? Extant studies fail to draw clear conclusions either from the studies of professional sociology or labor economics.By using the national data and higher education institutions' public data,this paper tries to answer this question from the perspective of structure,based on the characteristics of the academic profession,as well as the theories of general equilibrium and the segmentation of labor market.From the narrow sense,academic labor market is a market composed of full-time faculty within four-year HEIs.According to the stage of faculty's entry and exit from academic posts,the academic labor market can be divided into four parts,namely,the entry market,the promotion market,the mobile market,and the exit market.This paper focuses on the entry market,and mainly analyzes the relationship between the demand for new faculty in public HEIs and the supply of doctoral graduates in China.The academic labor market has the characteristics of integrating demand and supply simultaneously,the dual level of institutions and titles,and the two-dimensional price of salary and prestige.These characteristics determine the core mechanisms for achieving supply and demand balance in academic labor market,for example,the internal and external mobility between the academic and nonacademic at the profession level,the geographical inter-urban flow that spreads from the center to the periphery,and the top-down inter-institutional mobility at the organization level.The demand for academic labor can be divided into three categories: expansion,replacement and promotion.Based on the education statistics yearbook,2017-2019 recruitment plan at public HEIs and the analysis of the full-time faculty in the Undergraduate Teaching Quality Report from 2015 to 2016,this study finds that during the quality development stage of higher education,the expansion demand for academic labor has increased slightly,the replacement demand has been expanding,and the promotion demand has continued to be stable.Specifically,in terms of the disciplinary structure,the demands of science,engineering and medical science are larger in contrast to less demands for philosophy and history,whereas the demands of oversea and post-doctoral experience took place amongst science and engineering disciplines;in terms of the hierarchical structure,high-level “985” colleges tend to recruit oversea returnees,and other middle-level doctor-grant universities focus on domestic promising doctors,while the ground-level non-doctoral-grant universities have to recruit masters in many cases;in terms of the regional structure,according to the number of public universities and the proportion of doctor-grant universities,provinces can be divided into four types,namely,high standard and strong demand,high standard but weak demand,low standard but strong demand,and low standard and weak demand.The supply of academic labor can be divided into three categories: the off-job domestic supply,the returnees' supply,and the in-job implicit supply.Based on the education statistics yearbook and the public data of the faculty recruited by public HEIs in 2018 and the employment data of doctoral graduates from Graduate Employment Quality Report in 2017,this paper finds that at the quality development stage,both domestic and returnees' supply is rising whilst the implicit supply is shrinking.Regarding the disciplinary structure,it finds that more doctoral degrees were granted in science,engineering and medicine,however other disciplines granted less doctors comparatively.It also finds that at the hierarchical structure,the returnees occupy the high-level supply,the 985 university at the middle-level supply,and other doctor-grant universities constitute the fundamental supply.According to province's doctoral training and the degree of doctoral inflows from other provinces,the academic labor supply can also be divided into four types: both high self-supply and inflow,high self-supply but low inflow,low self-supply but high inflow,and both low self-supply and inflow.There are two basic methods in judging the supply and demand of academic labor,one is the direct direct data-comparison of supply and demand,the other is the indirect measurement of the doctor rate at non-doctor-grant universities.Accordingly,our study finds that Chinese academic labor market is still in short supply generally.In terms of the disciplinary structure,the supply and demand situation of academic labor market in different disciplines in China is quite different.The advantage of local doctoral training and the more adequate supply of returnees make the supply of science and engineering relatively sufficient for the supply of humanities and social sciences.In the hierarchical structure,it seems that the supply of high-end talents in China is insufficient,especially the outstanding returnees and top domestic talents.Worse still,on account of the dual shortage of prestige and geographical advantage,the HEIs in the central and western regions face the dilemma in recruiting doctoral graduates,which leads to a hierarchy highlighted by the equilibrium at the middle-level,but short of supply at the higher or lower level.In terms of the regional structure,doctor-grant universities in China are mainly located in the east and a few provinces in the central and western regions.Doctor graduates' employment choices are also characterized by a one-way flow to the east,thus forming a regional supply and demand structure highlighted by the equilibrium in the east,but short of supply in the middle and west.From the perspective of supply-side reform,this paper proposes a structural optimization to appropriately improve the training scale of doctoral students,optimize the layout of doctoral students' enrollment,and improve the level of domestic doctoral training and balance the regional distribution of doctoral programs.For the first time,from the perspective of structure,this paper focuses on the data of public HEIs,and analyzes the supply and demand of China's academic labor market,which has been less involved in existing domestic research.