Does Graduautes Employment Problem So Serious?

Graduates’employment problem has attracted the attention of the whole society. It is important to ensure the employment rate of college students since it influences social stability and economic development. Studies on this issue try to find the causes of this problem. Few studies focus on the issue itself:Is the problem so serious?Initial employment rate and starting salary are the measure of college students’ employment situation. The recent low initial employment rate has led to the society’s viewpoint of the serious situation, it is reported the college students’ salary is less than migrant workers’, which enhance the judgment. But this paper believes that the initial employment rate and starting salary is not able to reflect the employment accurately, in contrast, there exists the possibility of exaggeration. This study has shown that after a period of time, the employment rate increased significantly, for about70%to90%. Besides, results show that although the starting salary of college students has little advantage compared to other academic groups, but after working for a period of time, their income growth rate are much higher than other academic groups, which lead to the steeper wage curves. The starting salary cannot measure the employment situation accurately.Then, this paper gives out a theoretical explanation for the objective existence of the low initial employment rate and starting salary of college students, as well as the findings that the employment rate and income dramatically increase to a rather high level in a short period. This paper argues that the enhancement of the employment network brings about reduction of search costs and raise of reservation wage along with it, which results in a longer search time. On the other hand, the expansion of industry income gap also makes the reservation wage in the former period on the high side, which causes the low initial employment rate, while in the latter period, the amendment of their reservation wage results in a sharp increase of employment rate in the following six months.As for the low initial income and the rather fast growth phenomenon, the paper argues that along with the decline of signal effect of the university degree, enterprises choose to depress the initial wage and raise later remuneration higher than actual productivity to compensate the former loss of employees in order to reduce the uncertainty they face. At the same time, the capabilities of the college students enhanced by Higher Education enables them to improve their productivity fast. Finally, according to the research results this paper proposes several specific policy recommendations.