A college diploma is still the ticket to a good job in China, even under the deepest economic slump in decades, the latest official graduate employment rate shows.

"Last year, we made all efforts to help the college seniors find jobs and the employment rate reached 87 percent by the end of last year," Yin Chengji, spokesman with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said at a press conference on Friday.

The data with the ministry showed that the number of college grads is more than 6.1 million last year and will reach 6.3 million this year.

Helping graduates find employment in 2010 is still at the top of the government's agenda, Yin said, adding they will provide employment information and government-funded posts in communities for those unemployed grads.

But the large number of graduates this year is posing a great challenge to the authorities in how to help them get employed, he added.

Last year alone, in order to increase the graduate employment rate, about half a million government-funded positions were provided to grads, Chen Jianhui, deputy-director of the Chinese Talents Society told China Daily on Friday.

"With the efforts taken by the authorities, getting a job for a college grad is not that difficult. For the rest of the unemployed, some of them have impractical expectations for their first jobs," Chen said.

Wang Boqing, manager of MyCOS HR Digital Information Co Ltd, said the rate is reasonable, and that many students landed work in the last half of the year.

As a senior student majoring in information engineering at Communication University of China, Ai Zeng believes the employment rate among his fellow students who graduated last year could be even higher than 87 percent.

"None of my classmates failed to find their bread last year," Ai said.

But some education experts and college grads are questioning the credibility of the graduate employment rate.

Xiong Bingqi, vice-president of 21st Century Education Research Institute, a non-governmental organization committed to public education policy, said in a speech last year that the employment rate reached the level of saturation before March last year, so a surge in late 2009 was impossible.

"It means that many problems exist in the statistical process," Xiong said, adding that many universities did not try to adjust to job market demands, but instead faked work contracts to increase the employment rate.

According to the current statistics methods, many universities regard those students who receive further education domestic and abroad, and those who start private businesses, like opening e-stores, are counted as employed, Xiong said.

According to unwritten rules at many universities, students cannot graduate if they do not find a job, Southern Metropolis Daily reported in July last year.

Yan Yiqi, a senior English major at Nanjing University, is surprised by the employment rate released recently and said that 87 percent is much higher than she expected because of the harsh job market under the economic downturn.

"The so-called employment rate doesn't reflect the truth to me since I overheard the rumor that those who flunked the postgraduate test and intend for another shot next year were grouped among those who got employment," Yan said.

Facing such fierce competition in the job market, many college seniors last year chose postgraduate entrance exams and civil servant exams as their way out.

More than 1.4 million students applied for 2010 postgraduate entrance exams, a year-on-year increase of 13 percent, according to figures from the Ministry of Education. About 5 million people took the civil servant recruitment exam last year, according to Xinhua.

(China Daily January 23, 2010)