Higher education has long been considered as an important pathway to labor markets. However, the association between higher education and labor market outcomes has become increasingly complex (Teichler, 2018). It is widely acknowledged that traditional academic pathways alone may no longer adequately prepare graduates to navigate transformed labor markets (Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020; Pham & Jackson, 2020). At the same time, the massification of higher education participation in the context of limits in employment opportunities has created “social congestion” in graduate labour markets (Brown, 2022). This imbalance may bring youth employment challenges to constrain economic growth, opportunities for social mobility and obstruct efforts toward poverty alleviation (World Bank, 2015). Furthermore, those lead to long-term career scarring and growing anxiety among young people (International Labour Organisation, 2024).

In response, many nations are reorienting the focus of higher education away from traditional academic orientations towards higher forms of vocational education (World Bank, 2023a). This trend is also evident in China, the focus of this study, which has experienced an economic slowdown (World Bank, 2023b), and is at risk of a middle-income trap. China faces a paradox between millions of vacancies for highly skilled talents alongside a record-high unemployment rate of bachelor’s graduates (Fu, 2023; Nulimaimaiti, 2023). In recent years, the Chinese government has implemented a series of reforms to strengthen higher vocational education, granting higher vocational institutions the authority to confer academic degrees. Despite the rapidly increasing number of enrolled students in undergraduate vocational education, there remains a limited understanding of how students perceive their education and graduate employability in their education-to-work transition.

Framework

Employability is widely conceptualized as a multidimensional construct that encompasses an individual’s accumulated skills, knowledge, and attributes (EU, 2015; Tomlinson, 2017). Bourdieu’s theory of capital (1986) has been extensively used to explore how graduates develop employability and translate it into employment outcomes. Tomlinson (2017) developed Bourdieu’s forms of capital to conceptualize the Graduate Capital Model in five interconnected dimensions, i.e., Human, Social, Cultural, Identity, and Psychological Capital to depict graduate employability. The Graduate Capital Scale (Tomlinson et al., 2021), grounded in this model, consists of 45 items distributed across these five dimensions. Initially validated among students from universities in the United Kingdom, the applicability to China’s undergraduate vocational education remains under-researched. This study aims to adapt and validate the Graduate Capital Scale within the context of China’s undergraduate vocational education. Upon validation, the scale will be incorporated into a practical toolkit for China’s undergraduate vocational students and graduates to self-assess their employability and identify their employability deficiencies for development.

Research Questions

This study will be conducted through the lens of the Graduate Capital Model to address the following research questions.  

RQ 1: Does graduate capital influence undergraduate vocational graduates’ labor market outcomes?

RQ 2: How does undergraduate vocational education shape students’ and graduates’ employability in the form of graduate capital?

RQ 3: What forms of graduate capital of undergraduate vocational students and graduates still need further enhancement to improve their labor market outcomes?

Methodology An explanatory sequential mixed methods design will be employed. In the initial quantitative strand, an online survey based on the Graduate Capital Scale (Tomlinson et al., 2021) is planned with around 650 undergraduate vocational students and graduates through stratified random sampling to be collected in three waves. It is limited to final-year students and graduates from 3-5 vocational universities randomly selected from three clusters of 33 vocational universities in China. These 33 vocational universities already have final-year students and graduates. The first and second waves of quantitative data are used for EFA (n=150) and CFA (n=100) respectively, aiming to validate the Graduate Capital Scale in the context of China’s undergraduate vocational education. The third wave will involve multiple regression analysis (n=384) to examine the association between Chinese undergraduate vocational students and graduates’ graduate capital and their labour market outcomes. In the subsequent qualitative strand, semi-structured in-depth interviews will be conducted with three groups of participants. Undergraduate vocational students and graduates (n=30) will be selected purposefully based on the quantitative results, i.e., with high, medium, and low Graduate Capital Scale scores. They will be interviewed about university life, extracurricular activities, post-graduation employment, etc., to explore how China’s undergraduate vocational education shapes their graduate employability through the lens of Tomlinson’s Graduate Capital Model. Furthermore, vocational university career guidance center directors (n=3), together with HR managers (n=3) from the employers already having recruited undergraduate vocational graduates, will be invited through convenient or snowballing sampling. They will be asked about the career services and training they offer to the undergraduate, vocational students and graduates, their perceptions of graduate employability possessed by undergraduate, vocational students and graduates, etc., to identify the forms of Graduate Capital needed for further improvement by exploring patterns through thematic analysis.

Preliminary Findings The researcher has accomplished the content validation process of the Scale through an expert panel review. All invited experts are familiar with China’s undergraduate vocational education. The results indicate that 39 items out of the original 45 items across the five forms of Graduate Capital met the minimum Content Validation Ratio (Lawshe, 1975) for inclusion in the survey. All the items under Identity Capital are retained, while two items from Social and Psychological Capital and one item from Human and Cultural Capital are excluded. Different forms of Graduate Capital differ in the level of sensitivity to diverse cultural contexts. After several individual consultations with these experts, some item translations have been refined for better understanding by undergraduate vocational participants. The researcher now focuses on data collection for the pilot pretesting of the adapted Scale to finalize the online survey. Significance This study contributes to generalizing Tomlinson’s Graduate Capital Model under the social, economic, cultural, and labor market conditions of China’s new reforms of higher vocational education. The Graduate Capital Model will be validated in the graduate employability of undergraduate vocational students and graduates with average or low socioeconomic status and academic achievements in a non-Western setting. At the practical level, the adapted Scale has great potential to be integrated or turned into a toolkit for undergraduate vocational students and graduates to self-assess their readiness for labor markets to facilitate their post-graduation trajectories. Those results will also serve as valuable guidance for higher vocational education institutions in developing tailor-made career guidance to support their students’ and graduates’ professional development for long-term career success. At the social level, involving employers to have their voice in enhancing graduate employability is rare but essential, providing valuable insight into how to better prepare graduates for their prospective careers.

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