College Graduates' Human Capital, Social Capital And Job Outcomes

The balance of graduates labor market's supply and demand has been greatly changed since 1999 when our country initiated the college enrolment expansion. What's worse, the majors in college were unscientific, and the teaching methods and content lagged behind the actual demand of the labor market. All these things lead to the dilemma that it's hard for graduate students to find a satisfy job. Besides, the financial crisis of 2008 has exacerbated the situation. Therefore we just focus on this issue, and try to explore the main factors that affect the job outcomes, and explain the mechanism of the job searching process by implying the human capital theory and social capital theory.Firstly, this thesis systematically reviewed the domestic and foreign literature of social capital, human capital and their relation with status attainment. Based on these theories, we put forward the theoretical derivation and propose the main research hypothesis. And a theory model was created after that. Because the graduates'social capital has not been talked frequently before, so we have to looking for clues from a large number of relevant literatures, then we came to the conclusion that there are two kinds of social capital, home-based social and school-based social capital, which constitute graduates' social capital. And we hypothesized that these two kinds of social capital, together with human capital, will be positively associated with the job outcomes. Besides, human capital and school-based social capital may moderate the relationship of home-based social capital and job outcomes.In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the measurement of relevant variables, the scales we adopted were all have been used by foreign and domestic researchers, and have been proved reliability and validity. When we translated these scales, the two-way translation method was used. Then we conducted the survey in many universities located in Nanjing to collect first-hand data, using both online and offline questionnaires. We used SPSS to carry out statistical procedures and analyzed the data we collect. The main analysis methods this study applied were the multivariate linear regression and hierarchy regression. We use these two methods to test the hypotheses we propose. After these statistical analyses, all the assumptions were supported or partially supported, and the theory model was proven reasonably. This model can not only facilitate us to explain the mechanism of graduates'job searching process, but also can provide valuable clues for the college students' employment issue in practice.