Twenty Years After the College Expansion: What a Second-Tier Graduate Found at Work

What does a degree really mean? Between a credential diluted by mass expansion and a job market that keeps raising the bar sit far too many individual choices.

In March 2010, Chen Yinuo was a senior at Xinyuan, a private high school in Anshan, Liaoning Province. Both her parents were in business and on the road most of the year; she was their only child. They did not want their daughter living the way they did. The best way out was to pass the gaokao and take a stable job close to home — teacher, civil servant, nurse were all fine options.

Like most parents, they had little idea what their 18-year-old daughter wanted. Chen Yinuo had pictured herself working by the sea, which at the time she took to mean the customs service; she also wanted to work at a big foreign company, or "go into business and make real money." On her application form she wrote down Shanghai Maritime University and Tianjin University of Commerce.

Whichever life she had in mind, her test scores made failure more likely. The Liaoning gaokao is scored out of 750. Chen Yinuo's mock exams came in just above 300 — not enough to get her into any university for a bachelor's degree. In the last three months before the exam she pushed her total past 500 and got in. Unable, for the time being, to talk her parents into letting her leave the province, she "found a school close to home": Dalian Polytechnic University.

"People always mix it up with Dalian University of Technology — Dalian University of Technology is a 985!" Next to that one, Dalian Polytechnic falls well short. Founded in 1958, it was called the Dalian Institute of Light Industry until 2007. In 1999 it absorbed the Liaoning Textile Industry School. But what really made it swell in size, and turned it into a "university," was the expansion of college enrollment that began that same year.

In 1998 the gross enrollment rate in Chinese universities was 9.1%, meaning about one in every eleven of that year's high-school graduates made it into college. In 1999 the Ministry of Education set a target of 15% gross enrollment in higher education by 2010, and universities took in students fast to get there. In 1999 alone, admissions grew 47.4%. The 15% target was met in 2002.

By 2010, the year Chen Yinuo sat the gaokao, universities admitted 6.6 million students, the largest intake on record. That year 9.46 million people registered for the exam.

From 2000 to 2009, to take in more students, Dalian Polytechnic University (in some of those years still the Dalian Institute of Light Industry) opened new majors and set up new schools. Its School of Management now has 2,000 students; before 2004 it was only a department of economics and trade.

In 2010 Chen Yinuo enrolled in international economics and trade at Dalian Polytechnic's School of Management, in Liaoning's second admissions batch. Her class that year had about 100 students. Their gaokao scores, on the humanities track, were higher than those of any other major at the school. Chen Yinuo's score was 40 points above the province's second-batch line.

Chen Yinuo decided she had joined the saddest group of college students there is, at a "lousy" school that was "probably upgraded from a junior college," where she "looked up the ranking, almost 300th," a place that "hasn't had the money to put up a building in years," where even the classroom blocks looked "ugly." She was a college student, yes, but "with a school this bad, if I don't study hard, I may not have food on the table later."

1

It is hard to say how Chen Yinuo came by her sense of crisis the moment she got to college; in high school she had been content to be the one dragging her class down. But she is hardly a rare case. "I woke up," says Wang Ya, another young woman who later sat the zhuanshengben exam, the test that lets junior-college students upgrade to a bachelor's degree.

One reason may be that the wider climate had turned tight and anxious: on the job market, the college diploma was losing value. From 2003, when the first expansion-era cohort graduated, people began to notice that the employment rate for graduates was falling. The "2006 Survey of the Employment Situation of Chinese College Students" reported that "six in ten graduates face unemployment the moment they leave school." The 2009 financial crisis made it worse. That year the government began urging graduates to head for the "grassroots," to the countryside.

Companies kept raising the bar, even for jobs that were pure routine, where a degree makes almost no difference. Retail is usually taken to be the industry that asks least of a candidate's schooling, but its requirements rose all the same. A retail headhunter who asked not to be named said that for anyone born before 1980, a zhuanshengben credential might still get through a résumé screen; for younger applicants, a bachelor's degree can be mandatory.

That goes double for the giants. Inditex, the parent of the fast-fashion brand Zara, now expects even its interns to hold a master's degree or come from a top-ranked school, a 985 or a 211. A procurement manager who graduated in 2003 says she has only a junior-college diploma — "I think work experience matters more" — but she knows the world has changed. A former Zara menswear regional manager who graduated in 2008 said he had won his promotion to regional manager a few years back on a zhuanshengben credential, because the store managers under him all held junior-college or vocational secondary diplomas. That could not happen now.

In Chen Yinuo's field, "world economics and trade," the top of the career pyramid meant an investment bank, an investment firm, or one of the Big Four accounting firms. She had other options too. As her college counselor saw it, a student whose gaokao score ranked near the top of the department could aim to stay on at the university, sit the civil service exam, join a state-owned enterprise, or of course go to a foreign company. In her first year he gave her a clear plan: to get into a foreign company, Chen Yinuo needed a senior post in student government, an internship at a big firm, and a GPA that looked good.

Chen Yinuo followed all three to the letter. She calls her four years of college "burning the boats." "As hard as it gets. When I went home on breaks, the thing I said most often to my mother was, whatever you do, don't wake me up." Her résumé, meanwhile, came closer and closer to the ideal template: president of the School of Management's student union, founder of a club of about 100 members, a graduating GPA above 3.6 ("nearly every course above 90"). "Only the school was a bit weak."

In the end none of it got her the job she wanted. Shortly before graduation she received a rejection letter from a large foreign bank. The letter said, plainly and directly, that the bank was turning her down because her credential did not qualify.

2

One day in 2014, a month after sending an internship application to the Dalian office of Coca-Cola, a Global 500 company, Chen Yinuo had heard nothing back. She dialed the head of human resources. The job was a marketing post inside a retail unit, and the notice had not even been posted on Dalian Polytechnic's message board — she had found it on another school's board — but Chen Yinuo believed she could do it. Her résumé had an obvious "defect"; she intended to sell herself anyway.

It was the first time Chen Yinuo had called an HR chief on her own initiative, something that later became a job-hunting habit, and it turned out to be necessary: the company's mailbox, the manager said, had been broken for the better part of a month, and they had not received a single new internship application. "She just said, 'All right, come in and give it a try.'"

All Chen Yinuo was asked to produce was an Excel sheet and a slide deck. Nothing in that could separate one candidate from another, and she began to worry the shortlist would be decided by school ranking. The two strongest universities in Dalian are the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and Dalian University of Technology. She wanted so badly to know whether her "poor school background" would knock her out without a hearing that she asked the manager, "I don't know what the students from Dongbei Finance and Dalian Tech are like."

"If it were now, I'd probably tell her what my strengths are, instead of drawing that kind of comparison — because the moment you compare schools like that, you've already put yourself outside the circle," Chen Yinuo said this past November. She added that the "circle" is real.

Chen Yinuo passed the interview and became a Coca-Cola intern, helping to coordinate display materials in supermarkets and analyzing what the spending returned. She thinks she got in because calling directly made her look "pretty ballsy," and retail likes that kind of personality; because the company was closer to Dalian University of Technology, which saved on taxi fare after overtime; and because it was a job where "a little quickness and a little effort are honestly enough" — "as long as it isn't something highly specialized, like investment banking, they're all about the same."

3

Retail and fast-moving consumer goods do not turn away people whose credentials lack polish. At bottom it is a sales job, a labor-intensive service business. "Most people don't want to do sales, do they?" says Tang Yun, who holds a zhuanshengben degree from the Shanghai Institute of Technology. The work carries a reputation for long hours and constant deference. But surveys show that after the enrollment expansion, a large share of graduates went into exactly these labor-intensive services.

Sales work covers more ground than most people imagine. Beyond property agents, gym memberships and the salespeople at 4S car dealerships, it includes jobs in the retail arms of multinationals, though usually at entry level. Luxury retail tends to prefer people who studied abroad.

Chen Yinuo's first job out of college was as a management trainee at Mars. On the strength of a carefully built résumé she had her Mars offer early. After the foreign bank's rejection arrived, she joined the Global 500 company. Two years later, having failed to win a transfer out of Dalian, she started preparing an application for Apple's "leadership development program," hoping it would take her to Beijing.

The program, extraordinary as it sounds, trains the future store managers Apple's retail chain will need as it expands. In August 2018, Chen Yinuo was on the floor of the Apple store in Xidan, Beijing, iPad in hand; at 5:50 p.m. the store manager would remind her to get ready to leave. In practice the job follows a strict procedure. "You just follow it, that's all."

What was genuinely extraordinary was where the people admitted to the program had gone to school. Her own background still nagged at her, and she asked around about everyone's degrees. "One has an MBA from Northwestern; I hear this cohort even has someone from MIT." Every one of them outranked her, except a single colleague who had already spent three or four years in Apple's stores.

There was pleasure, of course, in breaking out from under her credential. Chen Yinuo passed the good news to her college professors. They had stayed in touch, and she believed that among their students, ending up at a company like this did not happen often. As store openings slowed, it would happen less and less. "In two or three years, when they hire again, they'll want a famous school — or if not a famous school, a GPA in the top 5% or 10%. That's how it will go."

"I understand how they think. They want labor costs as low as possible. Say they hire someone from Dalian Polytechnic who happens to be one of the students who didn't try very hard — the company loses more. So they might as well take students from Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan or Jiao Tong, where maybe 80% are excellent. For the company that's the lowest cost and the lowest risk. But if you hire ordinary people and promote them step by step, turnover is far lower."

4

The "circle" never goes away.

At Apple, Chen Yinuo went out of her way to talk to the trainees who joined with her — "in a way, it's because I cared so much about credentials at first that I deliberately went and found the people from famous schools and talked to them" — and came to a conclusion: where you went to school decides things. "Past a certain rung, the limit isn't your degree anymore. It's how much of the world you've seen."

Part of the evidence was accidental and only loosely connected. "Back then I loved a thinker named Krishnamurti, and every time I brought him up with someone, no one knew who he was. Then one day I was talking with a colleague from a famous school and said I could lend him the books, I had a set at home. He said, I think I read them in the library, around sophomore year."

The more concrete lesson came when the trainees who joined with her found the job unchallenging and started quitting, one after another. "I noticed that for those famous-school graduates, it's unlimited. I can be at Apple today and quit tomorrow, and the day after I can go to EY" — one of the Big Four accounting firms — "or not go at all." That is an inflated picture, of course; but of the 20 trainees in the program's northern region, Chen Yinuo estimates at least five have already left. Some did move into auditing or consulting, and one won a place in a graduate program in the United States.

Unlike them, Chen Yinuo believes, even though she feels the same tedium — and wants more meaning from work than they do — she probably could not find a better job than Apple.

Chen Yinuo's account holds the two faces people usually give college. One is metaphysical, the other utilitarian. Xing Ge, an associate professor in the School of Management at Liaocheng University, has plenty of criticism for the enrollment expansion, but he thinks the college years matter enormously. "Without an undergraduate degree… you generally end up in some trade, cooking or selling, and life corners you into scrambling for a living every day. Everything you do turns utilitarian. If it's useful, you look at it; if not, you don't. But a college student is in one of the few free states life offers, where you don't have to think about anything, and you get to look around at the world."

People also treat college as an investment, one that should eventually show a return on the job market — even if they are not always willing to say so.

"These days I try not to think about return on investment," Chen Yinuo said this past November. "In the past the two most important things to me were probably money and face." But she is now weighing a change of career, hoping to reach the top of her professional pyramid: an investment firm. In money terms, of course, that pays better too.

5

Going back to a campus might be what gets her there.

It is an industry brutally strict about where you studied, as Chen Yinuo learned when she graduated. Large investment firms and investment banks still weigh the first degree heavily, which puts her outside the "circle" by default. "I understand why investing works that way. If I recommend something to an investor, the investor at least has to see your background; you can't just throw money at things. Dalian Polytechnic? Have you even studied this?"

Chen Yinuo's father — the businessman who had wanted his daughter in a safe job near home — agreed with her for the first time. She relays his words: "If you want to learn something systematically, school is probably the fastest way. An MBA of a year and a half or two years will broaden you, so why spend a lifetime broadening your horizons?" He also thought the experience would help the long-term relationship with her boyfriend. "The day you want to have a real conversation with him, your thinking and your horizons can't be beneath his." Chen Yinuo's boyfriend is a Stanford graduate who works in consulting.

The Zara procurement manager quoted above is preparing for the entrance exam for the MBA at CEIBS, the China Europe International Business School, though she thinks it "makes no difference at all to my work." Business schools have also expanded their intake quickly in recent years, and the headhunter Wei Yicheng believes that for the mid- and senior-level managers at big companies who have been working for years, the real value of a new degree is in the contacts.

Chen Yinuo has realized that shaking off her school background a second time means burning the boats again. Her new résumé has several gaps to fill: a fund practitioner qualification, a good TOEFL score, and the CFA charter, with its famously low pass rate.

What is different is that at 27 she has learned to hedge. Smaller investment firms are a little friendlier, and Chen Yinuo figures she might manage by "getting a few certificates, working out your own views on all this, writing some practice reports… that would help with the smaller investment firms."

At the interviewee's request, Chen Yinuo is a pseudonym.

Cover image from Poodar Chu on Unsplash, Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash