Graduate Labor Market Opportunities Across Chinese Cities: Urban Opportunity Regimes and Their Dynamics

Abstract

This study examines how advertised graduate-oriented entry-level opportunity sets are unevenly organized across Chinese cities and how urban opportunity regimes evolve over time. Existing research on labor market entry and interurban differentiation rarely conceptualizes entry-level opportunities as multidimensional city-level configurations. Using online recruitment data on graduate-oriented job postings for 200 Chinese cities from 2016 to 2024, this study combines inequality measures, Gaussian mixture models, and Markov-based transition analysis to examine the scale, quality, and structure of entry-level opportunities. The results show substantial interurban inequality. Inequality in opportunity scale and structure declined over time, whereas opportunity quality remained the most unequal dimension and displayed the strongest spatial clustering. Four urban opportunity regimes are identified: a Scale-led regime, an Intermediate regime, a High-quality, high-structure regime, and a Moderate-quality, lower-structure regime. The Scale-led regime is the most persistent, whereas the High-quality, high-structure regime remains the least persistent in the high-posterior comparison, although the estimated magnitude of its persistence is sensitive to classification confidence. These findings show that a less concentrated observed distribution of online postings does not by itself imply a comparable equalization in the housing-cost-adjusted quality of advertised graduate-oriented opportunities.