A man looks at an advertisement for Chinese online education startup Zuoyebang in the street on December 26, 2020 in Shanghai, China.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — For hundreds of thousands of Chinese people, Beijing’s crackdown on after-school tutoring this summer means their well-paying jobs are disappearing quickly.
While it’s difficult to pin down the exact scale of the job losses, data and CNBC interviews with people in the education industry point to how the abrupt policy change is adding pressure to Beijing’s efforts to tackle unemployment, particularly among a record 9.09 million recent graduates this year.
Tutoring businesses had little notice when a harsher-than-expected policy on school-age academic courses was released in late July, banning operation on weekends and holidays, and ordering them to restructure as non-profits. The directive was meant to reduce the burden on families, who often spend large portions of their incomes on hours of supplemental courses for their children, even those in elementary school or younger.
Companies lost large revenue sources overnight. Many employees lost a career path. Public disclosures show that prior to this summer, seven after-school tutoring companies, mostly listed in the U.S., had more than 250,000 full-time and contract employees combined.
Within a few weeks, the number of job seekers with a background in the education and training industry jumped — up 10.4% in July from the prior month, and greater than the 6.3% increase across the market, according to a report last week from recruitment site Zhaopin.
Half, or 51.7% of job applicants in July with that education industry background had also already left their prior positions, the report said. That’s a far higher share than the 44.7% disclosed by job applicants on the site.
Education industry job postings dropped, with the capital city of Beijing seeing the greatest decline, down 49% versus March, the report said.
Women and young people were disproportionately hit. Three-fourths of these education job seekers were female, while the category of those age 25 and younger saw the greatest increase among former education employees searching for jobs, the report said.
That’s particularly concerning as the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds rose to 16.2% in July from 15.4% in June, far above the nationwide rate of 5.1% in cities. China’s National Bureau of Statistics said last week it did not have details on the impact of the after-school tutoring policy on employment, but would increase support for college graduates in finding jobs and starting businesses.
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