China's "Educated Unemployed"

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]In 1999, one economist convinced China's government to flood universities with students. The economist Tong Men pitched Premier Jang Gi a solution to rising youth unemployment, massively expand enrollment. Families would spend savings on tuition, stimulating the economy.

[00:00:20]Students would stay off the job market during the downturn. Education as both stimulus package and holding pin. The Ministry of Education's own planning chief, G. Ba Chong, objected. His argument, if enrollment grew too fast, graduates would develop expectations for jobs the economy could not provide. But the government pushed ahead and announced 500,000 additional students would enroll that fall, a 47% increase in a single year. Gi Bao Chong's warning landed almost word for word. By 2023, more than a third of graduates were working in fields unrelated to degrees, and nearly 1 in4 were considered significantly overqualified for their actual jobs. Chinese young people started calling themselves, roughly translated, unfinished kids, borrowed from unfinished buildings, the millions of unfinished apartments in China paid for by families whose developers never finished them. The graduates in the buildings are the same phenomenon.

[00:01:27]Massive overinvestment in an asset whose value depended on sustained belief that the returns would come. But they didn't.

[00:01:35]And an entire generation is left holding the