China’s divide

“In recent years, many tertiary graduates have had difficulties finding a job, while factories have been struggling to recruit workers. Notwithstanding rapidly increasing education attainment, graduates’ skills do not seem to match those demanded by the market. Moreover, structural changes in the economy aggravate the shortage of skills in newly emerging industries,” the report writes.

This is a widely recognised problem, but empirical studies quantifiyng the skills gap remained scarce. The OECD-report by Margit Molnar, Boqing Wang and Ruidong Gao gives insight in the skills and knowledge gap of tertiary graduates of of universities and vocational colleges in China. “It also looks at the employment and wage prospects of graduates with different educational backgrounds.”

According to the researchers are caused by a strong urban-rural divide. . In third and fourth-tier cities or in rural areas, in contrast, there are fewer choices and thus less chance to get into a “model” high school or a top university.” Family background also seems to have an impact on future career changes, the report says.

The full OECD-report can be read here