Yingxia Cao

Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China: Institutional Management Efforts & Initial Employment Outcomes Yingxia Cao

Private Higher Education and the Labor Market in China focuses on Chinese private higher education institutions and investigates their institutional management efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market. The dissertation firstly describes and analyzes how these mostly demand-absorbing institutions include elements aimed at meeting labor market demands in their mission statements, and how they improve student employability and bridge graduates and employers through job-oriented fields of study provision, educational delivery, career services, as well as networking and partnerships. It then examines graduate surveys on initial employment outcomes about employment status, starting salary, job and education match, and job satisfaction, while exploring the associations of these outcomes with managed institutional efforts. Finally, it builds a conceptual model with two dimensions that illustrates institutional variations in management efforts and initial graduate employment outcomes. This dissertation concludes that many of the demand-absorbing Chinese private higher education institutions have managed serious efforts in linking private higher education to the labor market and some of them are even semi-elite in their job-oriented institutional efforts and initial employment outcomes.