Where do all the students who got into the second grade end up?

It’s not unusual for a college student to deliver, but “A Beida graduate decided to deliver” can become a million-dollar hit in just one day.

No one would be surprised if a college student complained that he had nothing, but once someone posted, “I went to 985 or 211, then I realized I had nothing”, the whole network immediately got high.

Have you noticed? There are so many topics discussing college students, but there is only one that can explode: the main character is a 985 or 211 college student.

They are a small group of people who belong to the top of the pyramid under the halo of prestigious schools. But in the shadow behind them, there are the blurred faces of the remaining 2,800-odd non-first, second, third and specialist college students in China [1 ].

In these years, there are about 10 million college entrance examination candidates every year, but less than 5% of them are admitted to the key construction head universities.

The remaining 90% of the prospective students, where have they gone?

As the “silent majority” in this cruel competition, what happened to their lives afterwards?

What kind of people are the college students who got into the second grade?

There is an inescapable standard called “a line” for how well you play in the college entrance exam.

This line is enough to qualify you for admission to the “key universities”, wearing a “985” “211 The “985” and “211” halo, to the top of society.

But in China, most provinces and cities have only a few percent of a top rate, the number of candidates taking the test, but there can be 500,000 or even 1 million.

In other words, if the high school is not a “college entrance exam factory” like Hengshui or Maotanchang, a class of 50 students taking the college entrance exam will end up with less than 10 students. In other words, if the high school is not a “college entrance examination factory” like Hengshui or Maotanchang, a class of 50 students taking the college entrance examination will end up with less than 10 students entering the so-called “good universities.

The rest of the ordinary students who are only enough to go to the second, third or even specialist, often born in where, where to finish the university.

Look at the top four second-tier universities in the country in previous years [2 ] [3 ] [4 ] [5 ].

Guangdong University of Finance and Economics and Guangdong Finance College, two schools in economically developed regions, where the percentage of provincial students for both the 19th and 18th undergraduate classes exceeded 90%.

Wan Nan Medical College, located in the central region, also has 94% of local students in the 2017 undergraduate class.

There is also Chongqing Medical University, which has a lower percentage of local students, but also has 70% of Sichuan and Chongqing students.

Is it that these second- and third-year students do not have the ambition to enter the north?

Not necessarily, but it is true that there is no place for them to land in the big cities.

Looking at the 2020 national ranking of second-year universities, only 6 of the 300 schools with the highest science admissions scores are located in Beijing, 10 in Shanghai, and 3 in Guangzhou.

Many schools, such as Zhejiang Ocean College and Guangdong Medical University, have the name “Economic Province” in their name, but are actually located in third-tier cities like Zhoushan and Zhanjiang. The actual location is located in Zhoushan, Zhanjiang and other third-tier cities in the province.

To go to these cities to study, the future is still unknown, but at least you can be sure of one thing: poverty.

In 2021, Tsinghua University’s budget revenue is 31.7 billion, and it can still get 4.3 billion financial allocation[6 ]; compared to Wenzhou University 1.06 billion[7 ], Dali University 570 million[8 ], Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics 490 million[9 ] ……

You study four years of college, but not as much as a fraction of what people get.

Moreover, the more underfunded the school is, the more limited the investment in research, education, and even life.

The second or third university, you lie in the original dormitory 8 people, no air conditioning on the broken bedpan complaining; your teacher also only take three or four thousand salary, lecture up to breathless.

Who wouldn’t want to go to a good university if they had the conditions? But for many people, getting into the second grade in their hometown would be great.

A typical portrait of a second-year student probably looks like this [10 ].

“Either from an unknown village or from a nondescript town, with a working mother, or a laid-off father, and rows of siblings who are not yet adults. “

There is no “first-tier city, high knowledge parents, international vision” of the top flow of resources, but also the lack of “But they may still be the first college students in their families for three generations, or the only hope in a remote village.

The college entrance examination has changed their destiny, but the actual effect is very limited.

There is a well-known theory related to educational resources called the “maximally maintained inequality hypothesis”.

It holds that the dividends of education expansion will not be left to the masses at the bottom as long as the dominant group has the ability to use economic, cultural, social and motivational resources to seize all possible opportunities.

For example, in China, before the university expansion, children from urban families had 3.6 times more access to undergraduate education than rural people, while after the university expansion, this figure rose to 6.3 times [11 ].

For most rural candidates and small-town youth, second- and third-tier schools in second- and third-tier cities are both a way out and a place to go.

Second-year students find jobs, but not high enough to get a job

Every new student who enters the university will say to himself or herself from the bottom of his or her heart, “The future is promising”.

But for graduates from different schools, their future and their expectations are not really the same.

In most double-class universities, the domestic and international promotion rate of undergraduates can reach more than 40-50%, but among a group of second-class students, this ratio is generally no more than 20%.

Academic performance and family pressure both limit the ceiling of growth for second-year students.

A social study of a major university in Beijing showed that family background has a more dominant influence on college students’ intention to graduate than academic performance [12 ].

Students who choose to pursue further education tend to have parents with high intellectual quality and their family’s financial conditions do not require much concern; on the contrary, students who resolutely choose to work are often motivated by the urgent need to be financially independent and to feed their families.

By getting a stable job, they can make their parents straighten their bent backs as soon as possible. Many mediocre second-tier schools have direct employment rates of more than 80% for undergraduates, nearly 60 percentage points higher than those of Beijing.

However, for ordinary students from ordinary families, attending ordinary schools, the thin paper diploma does not bring them too much expectation.

When you open the itineraries of campus seminars of popular companies such as Baidu, Ali, Tencent, McKinsey, etc., you won’t see the name of a non-key university.

These humble second-grade students dare not even shout too high in order to break out of the 8.7 million graduation army [13 ].

A domestic recruitment platform has made a statistic that the expected salary of graduates from “double first-class” universities is more than 8000-10000 on average, compared with the expected salary of graduates from non-dual first-class universities. In contrast, fresh graduates from non-dual-class universities only dare to ask for 5562 yuan, which is half of their salary [14 ].

However, such poor salary aspirations can only be realized in big cities with developed economies.

Relying on geographical advantages, more than 70% of 2019 graduates from Shanghai Lixin College of Accounting and Finance stay in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai for employment, with prime locations and popular positions, one-third of them can earn more than 6,000 yuan per month, but still 15% of them are paid even less than 4,000 yuan [15 ].

If one attends a second-tier university in a slightly less economically developed region, such as the Shanxi Institute of Applied Science and Technology, graduates with starting salaries below 3,026 yuan account for half of the total [16 ].

If we look at the wages of second-year students, we can understand how the argument that “studying is useless” came about.

The future of second-year students is still in their own hands

Despite their eagerness to work and low prices, graduates from second-tier universities are more than three times as likely to be unemployed as graduates from dual-tier universities.

In 2019, for example, before the epidemic, Wudan University and Fudan undergraduate graduates were not employed at 1-2%, while second-tier schools like Kunming University of Technology and Wanan Medical College were in the upper and lower 10%.

With the high unemployment rate and the huge student base, it is not surprising that the news reports of “street stalls with bachelor’s degree”.

What’s more, even if they find a job, second-year graduates can lag behind graduates from double-class universities in terms of job satisfaction, professional relevance and career stability.

In 2018, a state-owned unit recruited a total of 11 fresh graduates, of which 10 professional positions were recruited by master’s and doctoral degrees from Qingbei and NPC, except for a clerical post that recruited a bachelor’s degree student from Shaoxing College of Arts and Science.

According to the company’s HR explained that this is to avoid the use of large material: “arrange meeting rooms, book business trips, copy documents and then run documents, this is all his (her) work content. “

The heavy discrimination of salary and education makes the pathway of their class upward too difficult.

The second-tier universities not only can absorb more than 90% of local students, but also will keep at least 60% of graduates in the local area after they graduate.

Even the more children from rural backgrounds, the more they tend to return to prefecture-level or below cities for employment after graduation.

Although they have seen the world, the world has not become wide open for them to venture into.

One comforting thing is that, compared to their mothers and fathers who work to support their families, second-year students after graduation can more or less see a glimpse of stability from their jobs.

For example, the 2019 Kunming University of Technology’s school recruitment directory, the world’s top 500 although only 25, but the number of state-owned enterprises and institutions enough 536. [18 ]

The top three units with the highest number of recruits that year were Yunnan Power Grid Limited, Yunnan Provincial Construction Investment Holding Group Limited, and China Railway Kunming Bureau Group Limited. In the eyes of the locals, they were properly sought-after good jobs.

But for many second-year students, like this among the local state-owned enterprises or top 100 enterprises, not only to fight personal strength, sometimes also depends on the relationship behind.

Ordinary undergraduates who are not involved in both will still end up flowing to SMEs in large numbers. For example, like Shanghai Lixin College of Accounting and Finance, more than half of the graduates chose to work in SMEs after graduation in 2019 [15 ].

While 985 college students complain about working 996 overtime in big Internet factories, don’t forget that there are also many second- and third-graduates who are enduring the workplace rivalry and the deceitfulness among colleagues in SMEs.

The first thing you need to do is to take a look at the website.

The “double first-class” schools [19 ].

Most of the other second-year students who choose to go to graduate school can only go on to higher education in our university or flow to another general undergraduate institution. For example, at East China Jiaotong University, which is a provincial key, about 12% of students chose to go on to higher education in 2019, but more than 80% are still double non-general undergraduates [20 ].

For students who were not able to get on the key line in the college entrance exam, we still prefer that you choose a school in a developed city. In this way, both education funding and employment space are better than the same level of colleges and universities in small third- or fourth-tier cities.

Moreover, new first-tier cities like Chengdu, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Nanjing, etc. have also opened various talent introduction policies for college students. As long as it is a full-time university degree, regardless of whether it is a key, you can apply to settle down.

After all, if you can get into college, you have beaten 70% of your peers [20 ][21 ].

[1 ] Ministry of Education. (2020 ). National list of higher education schools.

[2 ]Guangdong University of Finance and Economics. (2019 ). 2019 Graduate Employment Quality Report.

[3 ]Guangdong University of Finance. (2018 ). Annual report on employment quality of 2018 graduates.

[4 ]Wannan Medical College. (2017). 2017 Graduates’ Employment Quality Report.

[5 ]Chongqing Medical University. (2019). 2019 Annual Report on Employment Quality of Graduates.

[6 ]Tsinghua University. (2021). Tsinghua University 2021 Departmental Budget.

[7 ]Wenzhou University. (2021). Departmental budget of Wenzhou University in 2021.

[8 ]Dali University. (2021). Dali University 2021 Departmental Budget Information Disclosure.

[9 ]Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics. (2021). Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics.

[10 ]Huang Deng. (2020). My second grade student. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House.

[11 ] Li Chunling. (2010). Higher education expansion and inequality of educational opportunities: An examination of the equalizing effect of college expansion. Sociological Research (03 ), 82-113+244.

[12 ]Min Zuntao, Chen Yunsong & Wang Xiuxiao. (2018 ). An Empirical Examination of the Influential Mechanisms and Changing Trends of College Students’ Graduation Intentions Based on Ten-Year Ephemeral Survey Data. Society (05 ), 182-213.

[13 ] China Institute of Employment Research, Renmin University of China, Wise Recruitment. (2020 ). The employment market of college graduates under the impact of epidemic based on the analysis of big data of online recruitment platform.

[14 ] Boss Direct Recruitment Research Institute. (2020). 2020 Spring Recruitment Trends Report for Fresh Graduates.

[15 ]Shanghai Lixin College of Accounting and Finance. (2019). 2019 graduate employment quality report.

[16 ] Shanxi Institute of Applied Science and Technology. (2019 ). 2019 Graduate Employment Quality Report.

[17 ]Netease Digital Reading. (2020 ). 985 universities, there is a group of self-proclaimed waste of the town to do the problem home.

[18 ]Kunming University of Technology. (2019 ). 2019 Graduate Employment Quality Annual Report.

[19 ]Qufu Normal University. (2020 ).2019 Graduate Employment Quality Report.

[20 ] Ministry of Education. (2019).2018 National Education Development Statistics Bulletin.

[21 ]China News Network. (2017 ). Last year’s births hit highest in 2000 Officials say policy effect in line with prediction.