Time has come to talk of cabbages and jobs

Hundreds of thousands of would-be college graduates across the country are looking for jobs. They are already in such big numbers that they mockingly call them "cabbages that used to be piled up around Beijing street corners in winter.

As winter is prime job-hunting time. "cabbages" is the nickname they've given themselves in the online forums of university. websites such as those of Peking University and Tsinghua University. said Linda He, a graduate student at Beijing Normal University. The word first appeared in the cyherworld at the beginning of this year and rapidly rose to popularity.

"It also means that when you look for a job, you have to be as thick-skinned (brazen) as the outer leaf of a cabbage," He said. The students' self-mockery signals their concern over the gloomy prospects for employment. This concern is turning into a panic spreading on campuses, accord- ing to recent surveys by different organizations.

Results show that more and more university students are suffering from psychological problems as authorities seek solutions to improve the job-search climate.

"We know how the students feel, and we're doing everything we can," said Wang Xuming, Ministry of Education spokesman. The ministry has asked universities to give top prior- ity to better employment services for graduates in 2007.

In South China's Quangdong Province, one of the country's major economic engines, each university seems to have a few students who have been sent to the mental hospital because of the pressure in job hunting, local educational authorities said yesterday.

The results of the most recent survey, carried out by China Youth Daily and QQ.com, were published last week. Of the 3,747 college students who responded, 58 per cent said "yes" when asked if he or she is panicking about having to find a job.

Job hunting fraught with anxiety

When asked which word best describes their feelings, 5 per cent said "worried," and 45 per cent said "anxious."

Nearly one-fourth of the students surveyed believed that it is "too difficult" to find ajob, and only one-tenth said they were "fully confident."

More than a third of the students claimed loss of dignity is one of the prices they are paying for job hunting, and more than half said they are constantly in a bad mood during the process.

This anxiety and depression brought by job hunting is the No 1 reason for the psychological problems of seniors in college, said Ma Jianqing, deputy director of the National University Students' Psychological Consulting Committee under the Ministry of Education.

A survey recently published by his committee indicated that 20 per cent of the 12,600 university students surveyed have psychological problems to different degrees.

"These psychological problems happen for a variety of reasons," Ma told China Daily. "For freshmen, it is because of their inability to adapt to a new environment; for sophomores, it is interpersonal relationships; for juniors, emotional crises; and for seniors, almost unanimously the pressure from future employment."

As to why college students have to worry so much about employment, 61 per cent of the students in the China Youth Daily-QQ.com survey said they have heard enough sad stories from older students, and 26 per cent said that reports in newspapers and on television channels are bombarding them about gloomy employment prospects.

As a result, more than half of the students surveyed said that they either had started, or will start, looking for jobs at least one year before their dates of graduation.

A record high of 4.95 million students will graduate next year, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education.

Based on the average employment rate of 70 per cent for university graduates upon graduation, nearly 1.5 million of them won't find jobs.

Toughness counts when you're a cabbage.

tags:cabbages  students  graduates  university  

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