Against global neoliberal trends, the tenure-track system has spread widely in higher education. In China, its adoption—beginning in elite universities and subsequently expanding to non-elite institutions—has reshaped academic careers. The system typically follows an “up-or-out” or “up-or-transfer” model: pre-tenure academics must be promoted—usually to associate professor—within six years to secure permanency; failure often leads to dismissal or reassignment. Evaluation criteria are rigid and metric-driven, prioritizing publications and grants (Liu et al., 2025; Si, 2023). Many universities often over-hire, intensifying competition even among high-performing scholars (Li & Horta, 2024). This structure exerts heavy pressure on early-career academics, particularly straining work–life balance (Zhang et al., 2024). While existing research focuses on tenure’s impact on research output (e.g., Yang et al., 2024), the subjective experience of career sustainability remains underexplored. This study addresses: (1) To what extent do pre-tenure academics in Chinese universities experience their careers as sustainable? (2) What barriers, if any, do they encounter in pursuing more sustainable careers? 

This study adopts the Sustainable Careers Model (De Vos 2024; De Vos et al., 2020), conceptualizing sustainability as a dynamic balance of performance, well-being, and employability within China’s competitive academic context. We operationalize it through three interrelated dimensions: health (physical/mental capacity to meet job demands), happiness (subjective career satisfaction and life-wide fulfillment), and productivity (measurable output and future employability) (Van der Heijde & Van der Heijden, 2006). Unlike models that emphasize individual agency, this framework foregrounds structural and temporal contexts—such as the workplace, family, and time—as critical to career trajectories.

This qualitative study examines career sustainability and its barriers among 20 pre-tenure academics across 16 Chinese universities, spanning diverse disciplines. Analysis was conducted in MAXQDA (v24) using a hybrid inductive-deductive coding approach, guided by the Sustainable Careers Model to interpret sustainability dimensions.

Analysis of interview data yielded three central thematic categories aligned with the Sustainable Careers Model’s dimensions: Health Challenge, Happiness Paradox, and Compelled Productivity. The latter reflects system-driven pressure to produce; the former two reveal consistent deficits in well-being. Participants generally met quantitative productivity targets—especially in publication volume—but reported declining health and career satisfaction. Key barriers to career sustainability identified include: (1) a peer-comparison-based evaluation system that generates uncertainty and stress due to ambiguous tenure criteria; (2) an overabundance of required performance metrics that fragment focus and increase cognitive load; and (3) perceptions of undercompensated salaries relative to workload and living costs. This study contributes to a broader reconceptualization of the tenure track — moving beyond prior research that evaluates its success solely through research output metrics (Yang et al., 2024). By adopting the Sustainable Careers Model, we shift toward a more holistic, human-centered perspective that values well-being, meaning, and long-term viability over narrow productivity indicators. This challenges the prevailing managerialist framing of tenure as a performance optimization tool, instead revealing its corrosive effects on individual health and happiness.

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