Chinese college graduates are finding themselves in increasingly fierce competition for satisfactory jobs.

College graduates will number 4.1 million next summer, nearly four times the number in 2001. Many local educational policy-makers have racked their brains to create job opportunities for these graduates, once considered "blessings from God" due to their shortage .

The amazing increase in the number of college graduates is a direct result of the expanded enrolment of universities nationwide in recent years. It seems higher education has become widely accessible.

From the demographic perspective, however, higher education remains an elite privilege for Chinese less than 10 percent have access.

The problem facing the country is not that we have too many college graduates. In fact, it is quite the opposite: We are in desperate need of high-calibre human capital to push the country, vast but with unbalanced development, on the road towards an all-round well-off society.

Lack of competent human capital, for example, remains an obstacle for local social and economic development in some poverty-stricken western regions.

In contrast, about 27 percent of the country's new college graduates are without a job this year, according to the Ministry of Education, a fact that is puzzling, though not surprising.

It means something is wrong with our structural balance.

If we know more about the country's split economy, with the less prosperous rural areas providing much fewer job opportunities, it would be easier for us to understand the discrepancies in the job market. Most graduates swarm to cities, especially big ones, to find a satisfactory position and enjoy the comfortable infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, college students need to lower their expectations in the face of an increasingly competitive market. In the past when there were much fewer young college graduates, they could all secure a job in big cities with a high salary and comfortable working environment. Those good days have gone.

Now that the climate has changed, graduates should adapt themselves to reality and try to seek opportunities in smaller, less prosperous cities and regions, where there may be more room for personal development.

This is a pragmatic choice they have to make.

Universities also have much room for improvement. They should strive to improve quality of education, besides just expanding enrolment and raising tuition fee levels, so that their students possess the skills to ensure a rewarding job.

It is certainly not rational to point the finger at college enrolment expansion for the current employment bottleneck. But their slow curriculum reforms, which are in stark contrast with their expansion initiatives, and failure to better adapt their students to market demand, are a cause for criticism.

The universities seem to have focused more on training white-collar managers than applicable technicians and other ordinary professionals.

In the long term, China's balanced development will improve its employment distribution. In the short term, a change in the teaching method of colleges, together with a change in graduates' mentality, will ease, if not eliminate, the tension in the job market.

(China Daily November 22, 2005)