Hundreds of thousands of would-be college graduates across the country are looking for jobs. They're already so many of them that they're mockingly called "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 and Tsinghua Universities, said Linda He, a graduate student at Beijing Normal University.

 

The word first appeared in the cyberworld at the beginning of this year and rapidly rose in 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 employment prospects. This concern is turning into a panic spreading on campuses, according to recent surveys by a number of 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 priority to better employment services for graduates in 2007.

 

In South China's Guangdong Province, one of the country's major economic engines, each university seems to have a few students who've been sent to hospital because of the pressure of 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 percent said "yes" when asked if they were panicking about finding a job.

 

When asked which word best described their feelings--five percent said "worried," and 45 percent were "anxious."

 

Nearly a quarter of students surveyed believed it was "too difficult" to find a job and only one-tenth said they were "fully confident."

 

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

 

This anxiety and depression brought about by job hunting is the number one 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 percent of the 12,600 university students surveyed had psychological problems to different degrees.

 

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

 

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

 

As a result more than half of the students surveyed said 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 percent for university graduates upon graduation, nearly 1.5 million of them won't find jobs.

 

Toughness counts when you're a cabbage!

 

(China Daily December 13, 2006)