LIU YANG, A COAL MINER’S daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.

Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.

Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.

Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a whitecollar future. Since 1998, the number of college graduates has risen from 830,000 a year to more than six million.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet also a cause for concern. The economy, though robust, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of educated young adults.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

In a kind of cruel reversal, China’s old migrant class - uneducated villagers who flocked to factory towns - are now in high demand, with spot labor shortages and tighter government oversight driving up blue-collar wages nearly 80 percent between 2003 and 2009. But the starting pay for those trained in accounting, finance and computer programming has, during the same periond, remained the same.

But the lure of spectacular wealth in coastal cities like Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen keeps young graduates coming.

“Compared with Beijing, my hometown in Shanxi feels like it’s stuck in the 1950s,” said Li Xudong, 25, one of Ms. Liu’s classmates. “If I stayed there, my life would be empty and depressing.”

But new arrivals find that their provincial degrees earn them little respect in the big city. Also, they lack guanxi, or personal connections. And they quickly bump up against the bureaucracy of population management, the hukou system, which denies migrants subsidized housing and other benefits.

Add to this a demographic tide that has increased the ranks of China’s 20-to-25-year-olds to 123 million.

“China has really improved the quality of its work force, but on the other hand competition has never been more serious,” said Peng Xizhe, dean of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai.

A fellow Datong University graduate, Yuan Lei, questioned the exuberance of Ms. Liu, Mr. Li and three friends . Mr. Yuan had arrived in Beijing months earlier but was still jobless.

“If you’re not the son of an official or you don’t come from money, life is going to be bitter,” he told them over bowls of 90-cent noodles, their first meal in the capital.

As the light faded and the streets became thick with young receptionists, cashiers and sales clerks heading home, Mr. Yuan led his friends down a dank alley and up an unsteady staircase to his room. It was about the width of a queen-size bed, and he shared a filthy toilet with dozensof other tenants.

Mr. Li smiled as he took in the scene. “I’m ready to go out into the world and test myself,” he said.

The next five months would provide more of a test than he or the others had expected. Mr. Li elbowed his way through crowded job fairs but came away empty-handed. In the end, he and his friends settled for sales jobs with an instant noodle company. The starting salary, a low $180 a month, turned out to be partly contingent on meeting ambitious sales figures. They worked 12-hour days.

“This isn’t what I want to be doing, but at least I have a job,” said Mr. Li . Because he had sold only 800 cases of noodles that month, 200 short of his sales target, Mr. Li’s paltry salary was taking a hit.

Uneducated workers see demand and wages rise.

Mr. Li worried aloud whether he would be able to marry his high school sweetheart, who had accompanied him here, if he could not earn enough money to buy a home.

In his culture, a groom is expected to provide an apartment for his bride. By November, the pressure had taken its toll on two of the others, including Liu Yang, who returned home.

That left Mr. Yuan, Mr. Li and their girlfriends. Over dinner one night, they complained about the unkindness of Beijingers, the boredom of their jobs. “Now that I see what the outside world is like, my only regret is that I didn’t have more fun in college,” Mr. Yuan said.


By ANDREW JACOBS