Will work for 2,300 yuan

... a month, which is what a survey shows is the average monthly income of Beijing university graduates (BA through PhD). There were 14,000 of them in the survey. Each year the number of university graduates hitting the job market increases, with next year's figures expected to top 200,000 for the first time ever. However the economy is only providing jobs for about 90 percent of them, meaning that 20,000 of the 2007 graduates are not going to find work.

Here in Shanghai, the students have taken to locking rival students out of job fairs:

At yesterday's 2007 Efesco job fair at Fudan University, students holding a Fudan student card were admitted at 9am, while non-Fudan students were forced to wait until 10:45am before being granted access.

"It seems to be something unfair," said a Jiao Tong University student surnamed Zhu, who spent more than two hours traveling to the fair from Jiao Tong's Minhang campus.

Although the students from other universities do manage to get in, the fairs mostly close at noon. Of course, each university has a similar one, so you could argue that every student gets preferential treatment at at least one job fair, but that would assume that the job fairs were all 'equal.' That brings up an interesting question -- which is how are the job fairs different? Do the plum jobs and employers spend more time and energy at the elite schools? Or is there a difference in size and scale?

Photo from chinaedunet.com