Examining Chinese University Students’ Employability and Entrepreneurship in the Context of Higher Education Massification: A Structure-Agency Perspective

• In Event: Higher education for workforce development: Pathways, systems, and challenges

Proposal

Research Background

The expansion of Mainland China’s higher education since 1999 has led to some negative consequences regarding university graduates’ employment, including under-employment and unemployment, which have been a major topic at the center of educational policy discourse in China. Accordingly, the Chinese government has implemented an application-oriented reform to improve university students’ employability to solve these issues (Wright & Wei, 2020; Xiong, Yang, & Shen, 2022). In this reform, education for employability and entrepreneurship has been promoted as a significant remedy for the employment issues brought about by the massification of higher education in China. However, its effectiveness still needs investigation because young entrepreneurs face many obstacles regarding skills, financial support, and culture (Kang & Xiong, 2021).

Why does entrepreneurship and innovation education not bring the expected outcomes for Chinese university graduates’ employment? From a student agency perspective, entrepreneurship education is essentially against Chinese educational traditions and practices featured homogeneity. Student agency refers to individual students’ self-efficacy and efforts to control their learning activities and achieve expected outcomes (Bandura, 2001). In higher education, student agency has been considered significant in promoting student-centered teaching and learning (Klemenčič, 2020). In addition, Marginson (2023) argued that “higher education is a reflexive process of self-formation that establishes, or deepens, ongoing self-making, grounded in self-aware agency, that continues through life. … The integral elements of higher education as self-formation are the autonomy of the learner, the will to learn, reflexive agency, and immersion in knowledge” (p. 62; emphasis in original). Specifically, for employment education, students’ agency advancement has been approved as necessary (O’Meara et al., 2014). The agency theory also focuses on the interaction between agents and their contexts. While the social system exerts implicit and explicit impacts on agents’ social pathways, students as human agents can apply various forms of “internal conversations”—communicative reflexives, autonomous reflexives, meta-reflexives, and fractured reflexives—to reflect and act upon their facing social situations (Archer, 2003).

Research Design

This structure-agency framework provides an angle to examine how China’s cultural, policy, and educational practices (structure) influence university students’ employment and entrepreneurship efforts (agency). This study adopts this structure-agency framework to reflect on Chinese university students’ self-formation in terms of employment based on a case study of young entrepreneurs’ experiences in Shenzhen to put forward the arguments on the challenges and future development of university students’ employability-related self-formation in China’s higher education. In specific, this study applied a qualitative approach of interviewing 37 young Chinese entrepreneurs based in Shenzhen to explore their entrepreneurship efforts and barriers in their practices.

Major Findings

Based on the interview data, this study summarized three categories of barriers faced by these young entrepreneurs in Shenzhen: personal trait-related, resource-related, and culture-related barriers. The personal trait-related barriers refer to the lack of training in entrepreneurial traits and skills, such as risk-taking and creativity, in interviewees’ higher education. Regarding the resource-related barriers, interviewees indicated they faced financial shortages at the early stage of their entrepreneurial efforts. Intertwined with the personal trait-related barriers of insufficient skills in interpersonal relationships in the Chinese context, these young entrepreneurs lacked personal networks, which are essential for securing external funding sources and their startups’ sustainable development. Finally, the interviews revealed that the culture-related barriers were prominent. These young entrepreneurs discussed many negative experiences related to the culture-related stereotypes in Chinese society, especially those about gender and occupation.

After reflecting upon these barriers, this study found that the Chinese government has implemented employment and entrepreneurship policies that might be able to address the personal trait-related and resource-related barriers for young entrepreneurs through entrepreneurship and innovation education at universities and sufficient financial and policy support. However, those policies cannot sufficiently address the cultural or social barriers. In addition to the necessary entrepreneurship-relevant skills and capabilities, the government and industries should provide comprehensive education to young entrepreneurs to understand the entrepreneurship environment in Chinese society. Government policies relating to taxes and bureaucracy have little help with culture-related barriers. Thus, institutionalized efforts are needed to create an environment favoring entrepreneurship against such sociocultural backgrounds.

Discussion and Conclusion

Entrepreneurship education is agency-oriented, largely against China’s educational traditions and practices. In specific, this conflict is featured by “homogeneity.” The agency is anti-homogeneity; however, homogeneity is deeply rooted in Chinese sociocultural background and education practices. The homogeneity has many manifestations in Chinese culture and education traditions, including five prominent ones, i.e., the Confucian culture, the collectivist tradition, the legacy of the planned economy in higher education, and college entrance examination or Gaokao system, and the neoliberal trends in education (detailed articulations will be included in the presentation). All these aspects of homogeneity in China’s culture, society, and educational practices intertwine and shape the current obstacles against university students’ and graduates’ self-formation in employment and entrepreneurship.

In recent years, the word “involution” prevailed in China’s social media, which indicates irrational and unnecessary competition within an industry and system, including education (Huang, 2021). The prevalence of the “involution” discourse in Chinese society can be seen as a “peak” of the conflict caused by the homogeneity in the culture and educational practices. One primary reason for involution is the homogeneity in the “success” criteria in education. The narrowed focus on success pushes students and parents to invest their time and efforts into the battle of competing for the resources for success, including the Gaokao and the civil servant positions. However, the race lane is too narrow to accommodate all competitors if they all aim for one target.

The prevalence of the discourse of “involution” demonstrates the mediation role of young people, including university students, in the relationship between the current societal situations and human agents (Archer, 2003). The discussion within China’s society can be seen as an “inner conversation” of the public regarding employment issues. Even though it is a collective action, it reflects the inner deliberation of young people, including university students, on the abnormal and irrational competition in the job market, which was deeply rooted in the homogeneity derived from the above-discussed cultural, policy, and educational practices in China.

Author

• Weiyan Xiong, Education University of Hong Kong