【CATTI】考前助攻之同源素材练习9~教育主题EC素材

Graduation was fast approaching, but Yang Xiaomin, a 21-year-old college student in northeastern China, skipped her university’s job fair. Nor did she look for positions on her own. She didn’t think she had a chance of landing one.

毕业在即，中国东北21岁的大学生杨晓敏（音）没去参加学校的招聘会。她也没有自己找工作。她认为自己根本拿不到工作机会。

“Some jobs won’t even take résumés from people with bachelor’s degrees,” said Ms. Yang, who, along with a record 3.77 million of her peers, instead took the national entrance exam for graduate school last month. “Going to graduate school won’t necessarily help me get a better job, but it will at least give me more choices of opportunities.”

“有些职位甚至连本科学历的都不要，”杨晓敏说。于是，她和创纪录的377万同龄人一起，在上个月参加了全国研究生入学考试。“去读研不一定能帮我找到更好的工作，但至少给我更多选择的机会。”

China’s economy has largely rebounded from the coronavirus pandemic, with data released on Monday showing it has become perhaps the only major economy to have grown last year. Still, one area remains sorely lacking: the supply of desirable, well-paying jobs for the country’s rapidly ballooning count of university graduates. Most of the recovery has been fueled by blue-collar sectors such as manufacturing, on which the Chinese economy still relies heavily.

中国经济已从新冠病毒疫情中反弹，周一公布的数据显示，它可能是去年唯一实现增长的主要经济体。尽管如此，有一个领域仍然严重匮乏：为该国迅速增长的大学毕业生人数提供理想、高薪的工作。复苏主要是由制造业等蓝领产业推动，中国经济仍然严重依靠这些行业。

With the encouragement of the government, many students are turning to a stopgap solution: staying in school. China’s Ministry of Education announced at the height of the outbreak that it would order universities to expand the number of master’s candidates by 189,000, a nearly 25 percent increase, to ease unemployment. Undergraduate slots would also increase by more than 300,000.

在政府的鼓励下，许多学生正在寻求权宜之计：继续念书。中国教育部在疫情最严重的时候宣布，它将下令大学扩招18.9万硕士生——增幅近25％，以缓解失业。本科生也将扩招30万以上。

Nearly four million hopefuls took the graduate entrance exam last month, an almost 11 percent increase from the year before and more than double the number from 2016.

上个月，近400万考生参加了研究生入学考试，比前一年增长了近11％，是2016年的两倍多。

School is a common landing pad worldwide during times of economic uncertainty, but in China, the push to expand enrollment lays bare a long-running problem. Even before the pandemic, the country’s graduates complained that there were not enough suitable jobs. Official employment numbers are unreliable, but the authorities said in 2014 that unemployment rates for the college-educated two months after graduation were as high as 30 percent in some areas.

在经济不稳定时期，在世界各地，学校通常会成为许多人的着陆点，但是在中国，推动扩招却是一个长期存在的问题。甚至在疫情暴发之前，该国的毕业生就抱怨没有足够的合适工作。官方的就业数据并不可靠，但当局在2014年表示，在某些地区，大学毕业生在毕业两个月后的失业率高达30％。

As a result, many Chinese have worried that the expansion of graduate slots will increase already fierce competition for jobs, dilute the value of advanced degrees or postpone an unemployment crisis. “Are graduate students under siege?” the headline of one state-controlled publication read.

因此，许多中国人担心，扩招会加剧本已激烈的就业竞争，稀释高级学位的价值或推迟失业危机。一份官方媒体用了《研究生被困住了吗》这样的标题。

The Communist Party in recent years has frequently linked the prosperity of college graduates not only to economic development, but also to “social stability,” worrying that they could be a source of political unrest if their economic fortunes falter.

近年来，共产党不但经常将大学毕业生的光明前途与经济发展联系在一起，而且与“社会稳定”联系在一起，担心如果他们的经济机会不佳，可能会成为政治动荡的一个来源。

The government’s expansion push is part of a broader, decades-long effort to increase university enrollment. In 1997, China had fewer than 3.5 million undergraduate and graduate students, according to official statistics. In 2019, there were more than 33 million, not counting online schools and adult higher education institutions.

政府这次的扩招努力是数十年来为增加大学入学率所做的更广泛努力的一部分。根据官方统计，1997年中国的本科生和研究生不足350万。2019年，这个数字超过3300万，还不包括远程教育和成人高等教育机构。

Per capita, the number of advanced degrees still lags that of developed countries. There are about two graduate students for every 1,000 Chinese residents, according to government statistics, compared with about nine in the United States. Still, China’s economy has not kept up with the rapid expansion of higher education, leaving each round of new graduates competing for a small pool of jobs.

人均高级学位的数量仍然落后于发达国家。根据政府统计，每千名中国居民中大约有两名研究生，而美国有九名。无论怎样，中国经济仍未能跟上高等教育的迅速扩张，导致每一届的新毕业生都要为不多的职位竞争。