Rooting or Landing: Study on the Intrinsic Causes and Countermeasures of Slow Employment of Graduates from Local Universities

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of "slow employment" of college graduates based on a field study of a local application-oriented undergraduate university in the Pearl River Delta region. It explores the causes of this phenomenon from the perspective of cultural capital theory. The study finds that the asymmetry in the quantity of supply and demand in higher education and the mismatch in the structure of supply and demand lead to the failure of university diplomas as "institutional cultural capital". Students' conventional habit of "following the rules" does not serve as the "physical cultural capital" valued by organizations in the workplace. At the same time, the social status expectations of educational output make them reluctant to "lower their expectations". In order to cope with the failure of cultural capital, the "slow-employed" group chooses to "save themselves" by retaining their fresh-graduate-status and repeatedly preparing for exams. Based on the allocation of human resources in the market economy and the law of students' growth, the study provides the strategy of speeding up "slow employment" in order to achieve the goal of higher quality and better employment.