SINGAPORE — The job search wasn’t as smooth as Chen Lei had imagined. After applying for more than 80 positions, he received four offers — all for lecturer roles at top-tier Chinese universities. Pre-tax salaries ranged from 6,000 to 8,500 yuan ($840-$1,190) per month, with resettlement allowances ranging from 100,000 to 400,000 yuan ($14,000-$56,000).
After careful consideration, Chen decided not to accept any of them. Instead, he chose to pursue a postdoctoral position at another top-tier institution, hoping to continue high-quality research and eventually seek a better-paid academia job that offers him more.
Back in 2020, when he followed his professor’s advice and decided to pursue a doctorate, the prospects looked much brighter. A senior who graduated earlier that year successfully secured a permanent position at an elite university in a provincial capital, earning an annual salary of 240,000 yuan ($33,677) before tax, with a settlement allowance of 800,000 yuan ($112,000).
Chen had expected no less. As a doctoral student at a top university in Beijing majoring in engineering, he believed — as everyone told him — that a PhD should make finding a stable, well-paid job easier, not harder.
Tang Jun, who holds a PhD in engineering from a top Beijing university and now teaches at a middle-ranking college, says he’s baffled by one thing: why so many people still believe a doctorate makes job hunting any easier.
Social class
He calls it a distinctly Chinese mindset — pass the civil service exam and you’re set for a comfortable life; earn a PhD and a higher social class awaits.
“The reality is, if you’re not wealthy or well connected with industry insiders, it doesn’t matter how many PhDs you have,” Tang says. His own career path is far from what he once envisioned.
This dramatic shift in job prospects for PhD graduates is closely linked to the rapid expansion of doctoral admissions in China.
According to China’s Ministry of Education’s 2025 enrollment plan, universities are expected to admit 152,000 new doctoral students this year, bringing the total number of PhD candidates to about 700,000 — up 38% from 2020 and 80% from 2017.
At this rate of expansion, it is only a matter of time before China has one million doctoral students.
Doctoral surge
Yet the surge in doctoral enrollment does not align neatly with China’s current socioeconomic model. Some scholars compare this trend as a modern “Down to the Countryside” movement of the 1960s.
Researchers say many unemployed graduates feel as though they are being forced to pursue master’s or doctoral degrees. “That way, our domestic educational level rises while reducing potential sources of social instability,” one says. “It’s a win-win outcome in the eyes of many policymakers.”
China’s academic system is sick.
This aggressive expansion has also upended China’s academic ecosystem. Professors who once supervised three or four PhD students now oversee more than 10. With shrinking research budgets and limited time, pressure inside graduate programs has intensified. Competition among doctoral candidates has turned fierce, as students churn out paper after paper simply to secure on-time graduation, which is just the starting point of an even more stressful job searching era.
“What kind of life is this?” asks a prominent professor at a leading university in Beijing. “It’s a lifetime spent taking exams — draining countless young scholars both physically and mentally.”
“China’s academic system is sick,” he says bluntly.
Recruitment imperative
Wang Chengyuan, a professor of economics at a leading university in southeastern China, now supervises 13 doctoral students — a number he still finds hard to believe.
“We have to recruit — our boss told us to do so,” Wang says. “If we had strictly followed the original doctoral admission standards, at least nine of them wouldn’t have qualified.”
He adds that academic ability, talent, and genuine passion are typically essential for pursuing a PhD. “But many of my students enrolled simply to avoid facing the employment pressures. They came for the wrong reasons and kept heading in the wrong direction, wasting their best years.”
It’s not an exaggeration. Li Ling, who earned her PhD in new energy studies in 2024 from a prestigious university, says her field was once dismissed as “useless” by Zhang Xuefeng, a Chinese education influencer.
Her job hunting was unsurprisingly full of twists — sending countless applications to EV markets, battery manufacturers and even solar-panel companies before finishing her master’s program, getting few interview requests. Most of the openings only required a bachelor’s degree, yet she still found herself competing with PhD graduates.
Li and her supervisor agreed that pursuing a PhD for such positions would be a waste of academic credentials. But with so many doctorate holders filling those same jobs, landing one with only a master’s degree seemed impossible, which eventually leaving her no choice but to pursue a PhD.
No free pass
The doctoral program, for her, was incredibly grueling. Li points to her graying hair and receding hairline.
“It almost turned gray overnight,” she says.
What’s worse, Li was also diagnosed with severe depression during her study. She lost her appetite, at times, couldn’t even get out of bed, and gained some 40 kilograms (88 pounds) due to side effects of medication. She had to take a year off from school.
With such multilayered challenges, she only managed to publish two high-impact research papers within four years — not enough to stand out from her PhD peers. Eventually she stopped dreaming about becoming a college professor or continuing in research, setting her sights instead on a job in industry.
Four years on, a doctoral degree no longer offers a free pass to the job market.
Even if Einstein were here, he wouldn’t be able to find a job.
“By 2024, a doctoral degree carries about the same value as a master’s in 2020 — or even a bachelor’s in 2016,” Li says. “But the only way out is to keep publishing papers, endlessly.”
What would Einstein do?
One scholar at the University of Science and Technology of China jokingly calls this “academic paranoia.”
“Even if Einstein were here, he wouldn’t be able to find a job,” he says. “Strictly speaking, his papers were all published in physics journals, which by today’s standards would only count as second-tier.”
“Our academic system puts so much effort on publishing papers, then why hasn’t anyone in China ever won the Nobel Prize in Economics?” asks a scholar at Tsinghua University. “We have the richest research data in the world. Does that mean our scholars have never tackled real problems?”
What lies beneath this academic frenzy is a system where, instead of investing time and effort in true academic research, many scholars keep circling around the work of others without addressing real questions — just to secure more funding or faster job promotions.
Junk papers
Others, who have barely scratched the surface of their fields, simply repackage existing studies: proposing slightly tweaked hypotheses or new methods to “verify” old conclusions. Those recycled studies, in turn, are published as so-called new discoveries.
The surge in these “junk papers” has been staggering. In 2024, Chinese scholars published about 845,000 papers in international scientific journals indexed by the Science Citation Index, far exceeding the 483,000 by American researchers.
A study published by Science in May 2025 found a rise in low-quality papers based on public databases such as the U.S. Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). More than 92% of those papers were authored by Chinese researchers.
According to an analysis by Nature, of the nearly 14,000 research papers retracted worldwide in 2023, about 75% involved Chinese scholars. From 2021 to 2024, another 17,000 China-based studies were withdrawn.
China’s social science research is also filled with buzzwords like “new productivity,” “green economy” and “high-level opening-up.”
“These scholars know they’re talking nonsense,” says a professor at Tsinghua University. “But nonsense can still be turned into money, and that’s why people keep doing it.”
If you don’t play by the rules, you’re out of the game.
Students like Chen Lei have learned to play by the same rules. He admits to slipping “red envelopes” — cash gifts common in Chinese social tradition — to well-known academics as “tips.”
“If you don’t play by the rules, you’re out of the game,” Chen says. “I’m not from a well-off family or a powerful network. This is the only way I can see forward.”