Study on the Value Logic and Practical Pathways for Improving Employment Quality among University Students ()
1. Introduction
In recent years, the scale of higher education in China has continued to expand. The number of students from regular higher education institutions nationwide is projected to reach 12.22 million in 2025, an increase of 430,000 compared to the previous year. As the supply of talent continues to grow, the structural contradictions between labor supply and demand have become increasingly prominent, rendering the employment situation for university students severe and complex [1]. The General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a High-Quality Employment Service System for students of Regular Higher Education Institutions, explicitly requiring the establishment of an employment service system guided by “industrial demand and employment feedback” to promote high-quality and full employment for university students. Against this backdrop, how to scientifically evaluate and enhance the employment quality of university students has become a critical issue urgently needing resolution in the field of higher education.
Employment quality refers to the degree of excellence regarding the combination of workers with the means of production and the resulting remuneration or income [2]. The employment quality of university students is a relative, subjective, pluralistic, and dynamic concept that cannot be directly assessed using absolute indicators. Its connotation encompasses multiple levels: it is a concept containing numerous subjective factors; it involves multiple stakeholders, including graduates, employers, families, universities, the government, and society; and it evolves continuously with changes in time, environment, and society [3]. The concept of “Decent Work,” proposed by the International Labour Organization (ILO), emphasizes that workers’ rights are protected, sufficient income is secured, adequate social protection is provided, and sufficient job opportunities are available [4]-[7]. It necessitates the balanced advancement of four strategic objectives: “rights at work,” “employment,” “social protection,” and “social dialogue.”
2. The Value Logic of Enhancing Employment Quality for University Students
2.1. Theoretical Basis of the Value Logic
From a theoretical perspective, Marx posited that labor is a practical social activity unique to humans. It is a purposeful activity in which natural objects are transformed through tools to suit human needs while simultaneously transforming human beings themselves. Labor plays an indispensable role in human growth and development [8]. Labor education not only helps students acquire knowledge and skills but also promotes physical development through physical exertion during participation in labor practices [9]. Simultaneously, it enhances innovative thinking and hands-on abilities by applying new knowledge and technologies to improve labor methods. Therefore, enhancing the employment quality of university students aligns with the fundamental Marxist principle of the comprehensive development of human beings. Furthermore, from the perspective of competency, the factors influencing high-quality employment for university students can be categorized into three levels: knowledge and skills, professional role positioning and professional self-concept, and career motivation and professional traits. This model provides a theoretical framework for understanding the value logic of improving employment quality.
2.2. Realistic Dimensions of the Value Logic
In terms of realistic dimensions, enhancing employment quality primarily fulfills the fundamental requirements of individual developmental needs [10]-[12]. Through personal practical labor, students perceive the hardships of work, experience the joy of creation, the delight of harvest, and the satisfaction of success, thereby realizing that labor creates value and learning to respect the fruits of others’ labor. Research indicates that the enhancement of employment values is the most significant factor affecting the successful employment of university students; possessing ideals, convictions, and internal discipline better facilitates the improvement of employability among university students. Meanwhile, improving employment quality is also an inevitable choice for promoting the sustainable development of higher education. The fundamental mission of higher education institutions is to ensure that their graduates achieve person-job fit and fully utilize their talents. The degree to which university majors achieve their training objectives is also a crucial indicator for assessing talent cultivation. Consequently, enhancing the employment quality of university students relates not only to students’ personal development but also to the institutional reputation and social influence of the universities themselves. In addition, improving employment quality serves as vital support for national development strategies. The primary purpose of government investment in universities is to elevate the cultural level and humanistic qualities of the population, cultivating more talent to contribute to social development. From a national strategic perspective, the proportion of university students employed in national and provincial strategic industries reflects the supportive role of university talent cultivation in national and regional strategies. Currently facing the major trend of energy transition, the nation is continuously optimizing and adjusting its energy structure, which requires universities to strengthen employment education reforms to adapt to the demands of national development strategies.
3. Theoretical Construction of the Evaluation Index System for University Students’ Employment Quality
3.1. Principles of Construction
A scientific and reasonable evaluation index system for university students’ employment quality should adhere to the following basic principles:
The principle of scientific rigor requires that indicators be based on sound theories and methods, accurately reflecting the connotation and essential characteristics of graduates’ employment quality.
The principle of comprehensiveness requires that indicators cover various factors influencing employment quality, including multiple dimensions such as employment quantity, employment structure, job stability, and career development.
The principle of operability requires that indicators possess measurability and accessibility, ensuring that data is convenient to collect and statistically analyze.
The principle of guidance requires that the index system have a clear directional role, guiding universities to closely integrate talent cultivation with employment work.
3.2. Framework of the Six-Dimensional Evaluation System
The construction of an evaluation index system for university students’ employment quality should consider six dimensions: universities, families, society, employers, the government, and the university students themselves. All six dimensions are evaluative indicators. Each dimension points directly to “employment quality of university students,” indicating that these factors have a direct impact on it. Simultaneously, there are mutual influences among these dimensions, forming a complex network of interactions.
Dimension of the University students Themselves: As the subjects whose employment quality is being evaluated and the most direct perceivers of its level, graduates’ own satisfaction determines their motivation at work. Specific indicators in this dimension include satisfaction with compensation and benefits, harmony of the working atmosphere, and the degree of self-development realization.
Dimension of Employers: Admittedly, the direct measures of the value created by graduates are the outcomes and processes of their work; therefore, the degree of work result achievement and satisfaction with the work process are crucial issues for employers. Employer evaluations focus on indicators such as the stability of employment duration and the degree of work result achievement.
Family Dimension: The family is an unavoidable dimension when exploring the employment quality of university graduates. Parents often hope their children will fulfill dreams they themselves could not achieve, sometimes imposing their subjective ideas on them. Therefore, parents’ satisfaction with their children’s jobs is a necessary indicator. This dimension includes two indicators: the degree of parents’ ideal fulfillment and their satisfaction with their children’s employment.
University Dimension: As training institutions, universities have an essential mission. The degree to which training objectives are achieved and the alignment between majors and jobs are important indicators for assessing a university’s talent cultivation.
Government Dimension: Considering the efficiency and effectiveness of taxpayer investments in higher education, the government dimension includes two indicators: the degree of recovery of government investment and the contribution to social wealth.
Social Dimension: The issue of graduate employment quality has become one of the important factors constraining economic development. The nation advocates promoting higher-quality and fuller employment for graduates. The positive energy generated by graduate employment contributes to social harmony, serving as a societal judgment on the quality of their employment.
3.3. The “Quantity-Quality” Dual-Dimension Index System
Based on the perspective of multi-stakeholder satisfaction, the comprehensive evaluation framework consists of “quantity” and “quality” dual-dimension indicators, comprising 6 first-level indicators, 10 second-level indicators, and 32 third-level indicators.
The “Quantity” indicators focus on four dimensions: the implementation rate of graduation destinations, employment destinations, job opportunities, and job security. Within the “quantity” metrics, the implementation rate reflects the extent to which graduates have secured employment and serves as a key indicator of the effectiveness of university employment work, directly representing the proportion of graduates who achieve employment within a certain period after graduation. Sub-indicators for employment destinations include employment rates in state-owned and central enterprises, employment rates in government agencies and public institutions, employment rates in national and local grassroots programs, the proportion of regional retention, industry distribution of employment, and the matching degree with national and provincial strategic industries—indicators with distinct regional characteristics.
The “Quality” indicators cover two major dimensions: career development and satisfaction evaluation. This dimension focuses on long-term developmental potential, career advancement space, work-life balance, and graduates’ satisfaction with their own career development.
4. Analysis of Key Factors Influencing the Employment Quality of University Students
From the perspective of internal influencing factors, objective self-cognition is a crucial aspect. At the employment level, university students’ objective self-awareness is manifested in clearly understanding their competitive advantages in the market and leveraging strengths while avoiding weaknesses during the job-seeking process. This is mainly reflected in three areas: professionalism (specialized training received at school), sociality (the ability to form inferential thinking), and teamwork (examining one’s abilities during interpersonal activities). Cognition of one’s own career needs is equally critical. When assessing whether a career meets their needs, students typically use indicators such as salary and development prospects. Career needs are divided into material and spiritual levels: material needs refer to visible wages and benefits, while spiritual needs pertain to the realization of personal and social value. The organization of social relationships is a manifestation of individual socialization, involving the judgment of personal needs against actual capabilities. On this basis, individuals adjust themselves according to social demands and expectations, forming their own value orientations guided by societal trends.
External influencing factors mainly include policy regulation, economic systems, diverse social cultures, and school education. As the macro-regulator of policies, the state’s security system can effectively alleviate employment pressure on university students. The report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC explicitly stated that employment is a fundamental component of people’s livelihood, emphasizing the need to strengthen employment-first policies and promote high-quality, full employment. With the development of information technology, the socio-economic system continues to upgrade, and industry categories are becoming increasingly new and extensive. Facing competitive pressure, those who know how to transform pressure into motivation can survive better in a fierce social environment. In today’s globally integrated society, cross-temporal and cross-regional information flows have greatly expanded the horizons and minds of university students; however, internet celebrity culture has an adverse effect on their ability to make correct career value judgments. Classroom learning engagement has a significantly higher promoting effect on university students with medium-to-low employability than on those with high employability, whereas extracurricular activity engagement has a significantly higher promoting effect on students with high employability compared to those with medium-to-low employability.
Career selection views in the new era present new characteristics. Affected by multiple factors such as slowing economic growth and a surge in the number of graduates, competition in the employment market is exceptionally fierce. The phenomenon of “slow employment” has quietly emerged, referring to university students who do not rush to find jobs immediately after graduation but choose to review for postgraduate entrance exams, prepare for civil service exams, or take a break before making plans. The mindset of “seeking stability” continues to intensify; some graduates pay more attention to compensation, benefits, and job stability, leading to the emergence of groups such as the “postgraduate exam group,” “civil service exam group,” and “certificate exam group.” The trend of flexible employment is strengthening, with 51.8% of enterprises choosing to stabilize or expand the scale of flexible labor usage, and the proportion of freelance occupations rising year by year.
5. Practical Paths for Enhancing the Employment Quality of University Students
To systematically improve the multidimensional indicators of employment quality—specifically person-job fit, career stability, and graduate satisfaction—the following practical paths are proposed. It is important to note that the applicability and specific implementation of these pathways may vary depending on regional economic conditions, disciplinary characteristics, and institution types.
(A) Strengthening Educational and Teaching Reforms in Universities
Deepening the Reform of Professional Curriculum Systems:
Universities should collaborate with employment guidance centers and relevant departments to assist students in setting short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals based on their learning abilities, personality traits, and professional competence. Throughout the process of achieving these goals, students can continuously improve their skills and understand the job requirements of their target careers. This enables them to gradually develop a rational understanding of related industries, formulate reasonable career plans, and make comprehensive preparations for employment.
Labor education across different majors cannot be generalized; it must be implemented in combination with the specific characteristics and resources of each discipline. It should be integrated into the entire talent cultivation process—from admission education to graduation education—and combined with ideological and political education as well as employment and entrepreneurship education courses. This integration will help fully uncover the labor-education elements embedded in various professional courses.
Constructing a Diversified Education Resource System:
The singularity of labor education resources is a major challenge currently faced by many institutions. Due to limited resources, some schools simply equate students’ daily chores with the entirety of labor practice. To address this, universities should vigorously construct labor education resources from the following aspects:
1) Incorporate daily life into labor education. Long influenced by “score-only” and “advancement-only” mindsets, teachers and parents have prioritized cultural studies. In middle school, parents often handled almost everything to allow children to focus on studying. Upon entering university, to facilitate management, schools frequently assign dormitory cleaning and public area maintenance to students. This allows students to experience the difficulty of labor in ordinary tasks, thereby cultivating good habits, learning to cherish the fruits of labor, and respecting labor and working people.
2) Integrate professional practice into labor education. All university majors include practical teaching and social practice components; labor education should be organically fused with professional practice education.
3) Expand social public welfare initiatives. One of the main tasks of universities is to serve society. To cultivate newcomers of the era with ideals, skills, and a sense of responsibility, students must understand and serve society.
Strengthening the Construction of the Labor Education System:
university students in the new era are the reserve force for national construction, the leaders of the new era, and the main force in realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Universities must earnestly implement national educational guidelines and policies, enhance their understanding of labor education, increase investment and construction, and ensure that labor education is truly implemented and effective. This will improve educational outcomes and cultivate well-rounded newcomers of the era with comprehensive development in morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics, and labor.
To achieve this, the following measures should be taken:
1) Diversify the education system. Integrate labor education into the entire talent cultivation process and combine it with ideological and political education and employment/entrepreneurship courses.
2) Ensure flexibility in educational forms. Enrich teaching methods through classroom instruction, thematic lectures, enterprise visits, and social services.
3) Leverage campus culture leadership. Organize labor skill competitions and select “Campus Labor Stars” during events like May Day and Campus Labor Month. Invite outstanding alumni and entrepreneurs to share their stories, creating a strong atmosphere that advocates labor, respects labor, and encourages learning from model workers.
(B) Optimizing the Employment Guidance Service System
Strengthening Student Employment Tracking Management:
Currently, university employment work universally focuses solely on employment rates while neglecting the tracking of student employment guidance. Therefore, after students are employed, universities should actively communicate with enterprises to understand how well graduates integrate into their positions. Based on the actual needs of these positions, precise and systematic professional training can then be provided to current students. During the cultivation process, universities should pay attention to industry developments, fully combine them with actual industry needs, actively excavate and cultivate students’ vocational potential, and improve the matching degree between students and employment positions.
Actively Creating Internship Opportunities to Enhance Competitiveness:
University employment guidance centers and relevant departments must take proactive initiatives on top of existing foundations. They should actively dock with relevant industry institutions and companies to strive to create more internship opportunities for students and improve their employment competitiveness.
It should be noted that universities should avoid formalism as much as possible and strive to create specific internship opportunities, preferably with one person per position and person-post matching, rather than mere collective visits that lead to a lack of concrete understanding and real experience of the positions. Students should be guided to cultivate professional spirit and craftsmanship during internships, improve their cognition of positions, cultivate workplace scarcity, emphasize the cultivation of irreplaceable skills and experiences, and enhance employment competitiveness. Furthermore, students should be helped to establish correct career selection views, cultivate independent career selection awareness, maintain a healthy mindset, avoid blind comparisons, and balance national interests with personal development. Students should be encouraged to exert their subjective initiative and actively seek internship opportunities, enabling them to gain more personalized internship experiences while improving comprehensive job-seeking abilities and expanding interpersonal networks.
Introducing Artificial Intelligence Technology to Innovate Employment Services:
AI-empowered innovation in career planning and educational services for core college student competitiveness has become a new direction. Utilizing artificial intelligence technology to design career planning recommendation systems can provide university students with more precise and personalized employment guidance services. Against the backdrop of the low-altitude economy, research on the innovation of career planning and employment guidance courses in higher vocational colleges proposes a three-dimensional innovation strategy: conducting precise vocational quality assessments, constructing school-enterprise practice bases, and standardizing psychological counseling processes. This aims to enhance students’ career planning abilities and employment competitiveness.
(C) Strengthening Career Education and Planning
Formulating Scientific Career Plans:
1) To formulate scientific career plans, universities must base themselves on the market and update their operating philosophies, adjusting professional layouts based on industrial demands and job adaptability. For example, while focusing on technical teaching, higher vocational colleges should also guide and stimulate students’ innovative spirit, craftsmanship, and thoughts of strengthening the country through technology, oriented towards technological innovation, to clarify employment directions and development goals.
2) To build a long-term career mechanism, while university students formulate career plans, schools and teachers should appropriately intervene and regulate, which is a crucial link in helping them correct their employment values. For instance, specialized employment counseling activities can be organized, inviting experts from industry fields or outstanding frontline employees to give speeches on campus, providing guidance on career selection confusion through Q&A sessions, and deepening their occupational and social cognition.
Enhancing Professional Identity:
Universities should conduct education on the employment situation and policies to prevent some university students from ignoring useful employment information and other policy dividends in society while focusing on professional studies. Employment and entrepreneurship lectures should be held annually for graduating students to deeply analyze China’s economic situation and market industry status, instilling confidence in employment. Advanced models of professional ethics should be established; the effect of role models subtly influences students’ behavioral standards and value orientations. Therefore, schools and teachers should be adept at discovering and utilizing excellent typical cases within the school, such as inviting outstanding alumni back for lectures, to play a positive peer role.
Strengthening Self-Cognition Cultivation:
1) Guide university students in psychological counseling. For students experiencing anxiety, tension, or other discomforts about to enter employment or during the employment process, schools and teachers should intervene promptly to prevent the loss of correct self-assessment and social assessment capabilities.
2) Strengthen humanistic literacy education. This includes moral sentiments, humanistic cultivation, and aesthetic tastes, so that students’ employment value orientations are not measured solely by standards such as skill development and salary returns.
3) Strengthen integrity awareness through legal education. This involves popularizing basic legal knowledge in the workplace among university students, aiming to enable students to safeguard their rights and interests while improving their sense of job responsibility. It allows students to have reverence for the industries they engage in, understand the professional responsibilities and obligations they need to fulfill during their careers, and achieve knowing, abiding by, and reasonably using the law, thereby reducing employment risks while protecting their own rights.
(D) Perfecting the Social Support System
Government Policy Support:
The reinforcement of social cognition should prioritize national needs, guiding the spiritual outlook, values, and employment views of university students. Universities can post contemporary slogans consistent with national policy orientations, such as “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” and “I am willing to go to the grassroots,” on carriers like broadcasts, electronic screens, and banners to subtly influence students’ employment values through the environment. The government should continue to increase favorable policy support for university students’ employment and entrepreneurship, providing good policy guarantees from a macro perspective. New media should effectively purify the correct public opinion environment and promote more mainstream thoughts and values.
Enterprise Participation Mechanism:
To build a harmonious employment service environment, social enterprises should eliminate the evaluation of talents based solely on indicators such as diplomas and experience, and accept and grant university students space for personalized development. Universities should actively expand off-campus resources and establish cooperative relationships with high-quality local enterprises. While cultivating students’ practical abilities, this also opens up their employment paths. Efforts should be made to introduce employment experience scenarios. Strongly immersive employment experience scenarios should be introduced during the employment guidance process, bringing the real operation modes of different industries corresponding to majors into the campus. Students’ career selection views and entrepreneurial ideas are influenced to varying degrees during the experience process. For example, in a logistics industry experience hall for logistics management majors, the basic market operation scenarios involved in logistics management are restored, allowing students to intuitively feel the employment scenarios.
Deepening School-Enterprise Cooperation:
Addressing the phenomena of low employment satisfaction, low major matching degree, and limited career development among graduates of higher vocational colleges, strategies and suggestions for improving the high-quality employment of vocational students are explored from the aspects of deep school-enterprise cooperation, curriculum system reform, and multidimensional evaluation, to promote the employment quality of vocational students. Multiple measures must be taken simultaneously to solidly advance employment work, which is crucial for ensuring high-quality and full employment for university students. This paper discusses the basic principles followed by the employment quality construction project and systematically explains the implementation path of the project from the perspectives of six major systems: organization, institution, business, supervision, evaluation, and feedback, hoping to provide useful references for other universities to improve the employment quality of their graduates.
6. Conclusion and Prospects
This paper systematically explores the value logic and practical paths for enhancing the employment quality of university students. The study finds that improving the employment quality of university students holds significant multidimensional value, bearing great importance from the three dimensions of personal development, university development, and national strategy. The evaluation of university students’ employment quality should follow principles such as scientific rigor, comprehensiveness, operability, and guidance, constructing a multidimensional evaluation system covering the dual dimensions of “quantity” and “quality.” Factors influencing the employment quality of university students include internal factors (self-cognition, career needs, social relationships) and external factors (policy regulation, economic systems, diverse social cultures, school education). The career selection views of university students in the new era present characteristics such as “slow employment,” “seeking stability,” and enhanced flexible employment. Practical paths for enhancing the employment quality of university students include four aspects: strengthening educational and teaching reforms, optimizing the employment guidance service system, strengthening career education, and perfecting the social support system.
Future research could further explore differentiated paths for different types of universities, strengthen research on the factors influencing the employment quality of university students under emerging business formats, deepen research on the application of digital technology in employment guidance services, and strengthen long-term tracking research on the employment quality of university students. Through these efforts, high-quality and full employment for university students can be promoted, fostering a positive interaction between personal development and social progress.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions, which have greatly improved the quality of this manuscript.