Learning English

Among new university graduates in India and China, unemployment - and underemployment - are rising fast. Some fear that large numbers of educated, underemployed young people could cause social problems in these countries.

In India, five million students graduate from university each year. However, one in three graduates up to the age of 29 is unemployed.

In China more than 7 million students will graduate from the country's universities in 2014, and the number is steadily increasing. Unemployment among new graduates is somewhere between 15% and 30%.

Chinese workers without degrees are more willing to take factory jobs. However, the payment for factory jobs today is often higher than the payment for low-level office jobs.

Joseph Cheng, a professor at City University of Hong Kong, says that China's leadership is extremely worried about graduate unemployment.

Craig Jeffrey, a professor at Oxford University, is an expert on India's unemployed youth. He describes a similar situation in India. Government reports, he says, often describe underemployed graduates as “hostile to the state”.

There are more than 160,000 underemployed graduates in Beijing alone. Around one third of them graduated from China's most prestigious universities.

But, surprisingly, researchers have found that these underemployed graduates in China and India are generally not angry – they are often calm and quite optimistic, because they still believe that they will find suitable jobs.