As an undergraduate at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious universities, Crystal knew she wanted to end up working at one of China’s top tech or finance conglomerates.

Throughout university, Crystal, who gave only her first name for fear of reprisal from her employer for speaking to the press, did all she could to make herself hireable.

She took part in case-study competitions from United States management consulting firm Bain and Company, eager to show versatility beyond her humanities degree.

She completed four internships at tech companies including ByteDance, the maker of TikTok, and Rednote, China’s version of Instagram.

By the time she graduated in 2023, Crystal ranked in the top 10% of her class.

Yet Crystal’s stellar CV left her with just one realistic postgrad option: a master’s degree in economics and management, and two more years before she could enter the workforce.

“There’s no guarantee” of a job out of undergrad anymore, Crystal said.

“By the time we graduated, the economic outlook was pretty dismal. The Peking University class of 2014 might have got a decent job and lived a comfortable life no matter what after graduating, but it’s not like that for us.”

Crystal’s situation reflects the struggles that recent college graduates – even top performers from China’s elite institutions – face while navigating the country’s post-pandemic job market.

“It isn’t just that recent cohorts of undergraduates from elite institutions couldn’t find high-paying jobs,” said Nancy Qian, an economics professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“They were fighting really hard to get a pretty mediocre-paying job – meaning that the money wouldn’t be enough to live independently.”

Since the coronavirus pandemic brought the Chinese economy to a crashing halt, followed by a plodding, uneven recovery, newly minted graduates in China have faced a daunting labour market marred by layoffs and downsizing.

As more and more Chinese students graduate each June to fill fewer and fewer spots, top-paying private sector firms have pivoted to mostly recruiting those with master’s degrees, according to students and experts.

Alumni of China’s top undergraduate programmes have long flocked to graduate school: around 80% of Peking University graduates each year elect to continue their education.

But rather than earning a master’s to guarantee a higher future salary, students are now pursuing graduate degrees simply to secure a job, Qian said.

Even that may not be enough.

“Many people mistakenly assume that once they have a graduate degree, they will receive a golden key to employment,” wrote a 2023 report from Zhaopin, one of China’s largest online recruitment platforms.

“But in reality, that only buys a ticket to entry. Whether you can land a good job still depends on your abilities … having academic qualifications is the bare minimum needed for job searchers, not an advantage.”

More Chinese students are also pursuing graduate degrees from domestic institutions in comparison to years past.

At Beijing’s Tsinghua University – consistently ranked the best university in the nation – 54% of the class of 2013 chose to commit to a Chinese graduate programme. By 2022, that figure rose to 66%, according to Tsinghua’s postgraduation outcome reports.

At Peking, 48% of the class of 2019 enrolled in a Chinese master’s or PhD. For the class of 2024, that number was 66%.

Students now think, “‘If employers have increasingly high requirements, then I have to meet those requirements. So getting a graduate degree has become something I need to do,’” said Dong Jiachen, a recent graduate of the sociology master’s programme at Peking University.

Like Crystal, Dong knew that she wanted to work in the private sector – and that earning a master’s would be just the start.

“Even before beginning the job search, you need to complete a number of internships, obtain the relevant certifications, practice for the written tests you’ll be given by employers and so on,” said Dong, who worked six internships before landing a fulltime job at Meituan, China’s DoorDash equivalent, this year.

Since China began liberalising its economy in the late 1970s, the country has experienced bouts of unemployment, Qian said. But “the thing that was really surprising for this wave of hardships of the job market is that it hit the people who are usually considered the safest, which is the elite educated,” she added.

Many recent graduates who have worked hard to propel themselves into elite institutions are “dispirited”, Qian said.

“There’s a question of, ‘What was the point of it all? Why do we work so hard? Maybe we should just give up.’”

Would-be employees are also now demanding more from their workplaces, said Lily Liu, the former chief executive of a Chinese online recruitment platform with around 100,000 users.

“Recent graduates’ expectations are now multifaceted – expectations for the corporate environment, the industry values, the salary, the distance from home, the location. If these expectations are not met, recent graduates give up and go back to school.”

Qi Mingyao, founder and chief executive of Ruihua, a Beijing-based telecommunications firm, pointed to the wider issue of degree inflation in China.

“When I entered college in ’92, 100% of undergraduates could find jobs after graduating, and good jobs at that,” he said.

“Now, the graduate students of today are like the undergraduates of back then, and the undergraduates of today are like the vocational students of back then.”

Ruihua downsized from around 60 employees before the pandemic to around 20 employees now and has not hired anyone in the past few years because of the state of the economy, according to Qi.

If the company were to begin hiring again, Qi said he would seek out graduates with master’s degrees. “We would be looking to develop our software, and graduate degree holders would have more specialised skills than undergraduate degree holders.”

The labour market downturn could lead to cascading demographic consequences for China.

The next generation of would-be parents “don’t think they have money to get married and start a family”, Qian said.

“When you have a lot of youth unemployment, all of those normal mechanisms for people to meet, socialise, get married and have children and families are broken.”

In August 2023, the Chinese Government stopped publishing youth unemployment data after the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds spiked to 21.3% in June of that year. Beijing began releasing the data again in January 2024, albeit with students excluded from the dataset.

As part of the new update, the National Bureau of Statistics also said it would split the 25-29 age bracket – previously bundled into the 25- to 59-year-old age bracket – into a separate category to reflect the “continuous rise in the years of education youth receive”.

The youth unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds was 14.9% in May.

The bleak outlook for new graduates shows little sign of improvement, especially given uncertainty over the Trump Administration’s tariffs on China. “The impact of the American tariffs is that foreign firms are hiring for fewer positions in China,” Liu said.

After completing her master’s this spring, Crystal is set to begin working at a leading tech firm in Beijing.

“If I compare myself to Americans or Europeans, of course I’ll be unhappy – how can they have a 30-day holiday and still make so much per hour?” she said.

“But if I compare myself to previous generations in China, I feel like I don’t actually work that hard. My parents’ generation had long working hours too, and they didn’t eat well or wear nice clothes.

“When I think about it that way, it just feels like it’s our turn to shoulder the hardships that come with our generation.”