How graduate students cope with increasingly competitive job market: A comparative study of students’ strategies to enhance employability

• In Event: Navigating Access, Retention, and Success: Insights into Student Outcomes

Proposal

Introduction

The issue of graduate employment has increasingly become a global challenge, raising significant concerns among college students about their career prospects. The lasting economic impact of COVID-19, particularly its scarring effects, has constrained employment opportunities in the labor market (Tomlinson et al., 2023). Additionally, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has triggered technological advancements and industrial transformation, creating new professions with corresponding skill demands (Seet et al., 2018). On the other hand, over-education and under-employment have intensified the mismatch between higher education's talent cultivation and labor market needs (Cappelli, 2015; Mok et al., 2021). In China, the government's expansion of graduate enrollment in 2020 led to a sharp increase in the graduate enrollment rate, rising from 6.82% in 2019 to 20.74% in 2020 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2024).

This surge has exacerbated employment pressures on graduates in recent years. As a result, students are increasingly uncertain about their employability and their attractiveness to potential employers (Tomlinson et al., 2023). In response, some students choose to pursue more advanced degrees as a way to maintain competitiveness (Jackson & Tomlinson, 2020), while others opt to enter the job market as early as possible to secure employment opportunities.

In this context, enhancing employability is increasingly viewed as a key responsibility of higher education institutions, leading to an intensified tension between the mission of liberal arts education and its instrumentalist value (Teichler, 2000). Although some scholars argue that higher education should resist instrumental pressures and focus on preparing students to become responsible citizens (Marginson, 2023), the majority of higher education institutions tend to align with the social demand by fostering job-readiness employability (Sin & Amaral, 2016). Existing literature has extensively discussed the essential competencies for graduates and how universities should support their schoolwork transitions (Hillage & Pollard, 1998; Yorke, 2006; Cai & Tomlinson, 2023). However, as ‘norm-abiding rule followers and self-interested rational actors’ (Steinmo, 2008, p.126), students as key stakeholders and active agents have been largely overlooked in the process, whose employability is influenced not only by institutional support but also their active construction of meanings and lines of action. For graduate students, their experience is also shaped by the supervisor-supervisee power relationship, making the micro-environment more important in enabling or constraining their actions towards fostering employment. The ‘strategy space’ is termed here to describe the discretionary room for actions, created and maintained by students’ interaction and negotiations with the external environment (Han, 2020).

Therefore, the study explores the following research questions through 30 semi-structured interviews with graduate students from a research university in China: 1. What strategies do college students take to enhance employability in response to the increasingly competitive labor market? 2. To what degree their actions are influenced by their perceived career prospects and strategy space?

Theoretical and methodological considerations

Rational choice institutionalism assumes that individuals are rational agents with clear goals, making decisions to maximize personal interests within the constraints of institutional systems (Rutherford, 1996). It allows an analytical perspective to explore how graduate students’ strategic choices are influenced by their perceived career prospects and constant interaction with supervisors and others within the institutional environment.

The study selected graduate students in engineering disciplines as the target of enquiry. Through purposive and snowball sampling, the study conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with engineering graduates from a selected research university in China. Each interview lasted about one hour, focusing on students' perceptions of career prospects, supervisor-supervisee relationships, and job preparation strategies. The transcribed audio record was qualitatively analysed following the ‘code-category-theme’ framework (Saldana, 2009). Ethical considerations were given throughout the study, including informed consent, voluntary participation and anonymity of informants.

Preliminary findings and discussion

The findings show that students’ meaning-making of employability and their strategic actions to enhance employability are shaped by both external labor market signals and the institutional environment within universities. External factors, including salary levels, career stability, and professional development opportunities of respective professions associated with their areas of study directly influence students’ perceptions of career prospects. Institutional environment refers to university settings and the micro-environment shaped by the supervisor-supervisee relationship, allowing them varying degrees of strategy space for actions. For example, some supervisors do not allow graduate students to undertake internship or gain practical experience outside universities; the majority of Chinese universities set certain academic standards like paper publication for graduation, so students have to focus primarily on academic preparation. The study engages with the two dimensions—perceived career prospects (favorable or unfavorable) and strategy space (ample or constrained) to categorize students’ strategies into four types, termed respectively as the “win-win” model, “wait-and-see” model, “competitive” model and “transition” model.

The “win-win” model emphasizes the consistency between employment preparation and academic preparation. With promising career prospects and ample strategy space, students of the particular type often actively transform the accumulated resources within universities into their employability capital. The “wait-and-see” model pinpoints students’ passivity when faced with favorable career prospects but limited strategy space for action. The “competitive” model describes the type of students who are faced with unfavorable career prospects and limited strategy space, leading them to compromise or exhibit outward compliance while inwardly dissenting toward their supervisors. The “transition” model emphasizes students’ capacity to overcome challenges in the face of unpromising career prospects, facilitated by supportive supervisor-supervisee relationships that offer more strategy space. Students of the particular type often proactively seek to gain work experience in other areas beyond their disciplines to accumulate employment capital for future career transitions.

The study discusses and compares the four types of students’ strategic actions to reveal how students accumulate their employment capital to enhance future chances of professional success, while at the same time revealing the intrinsic complexities in balancing students’ academic and professional endeavours, as well as the liberal-arts educational objectives and employment-oriented educational outcome. The study therefore enriches the scholarly discussion on students’ employability by offering a more nuanced understanding and explanation of their varied strategies as active agents.

Authors

• Shuangmiao Han, Zhejiang University

• Shujie Pang