Tao Weisheng, a 40-year-old Harbin Institute of Technology postgraduate, has spent recent days selling balloons on the streets of Changsha and told The Paper he now earns a little over 3,000 yuan a month [1]. The question that carried him to the top of Zhihu's hot list on November 10 calls him a master's graduate who failed at his own startup and now sells balloons, and asks whether that choice wastes educational resources. A Tencent News video report from November 8, two days before the question trended, flagged in its headline that he is a master's graduate and a former programmer at a major technology firm [2]. The verdict circulating through the discussion is a familiar one. An elite degree spent on a street stall, the argument goes, is a waste.

The waste verdict answers the wrong question. A degree in China's current job market pays out across a whole career, and the first job is one data point in that span. The Ministry of Education expects 12.7 million graduates in the class of 2026, an increase of 480,000 on the previous year [3], and the same debate has run twice across record cohorts. The anxiety it generates is also merchandise: one day before the question trended, the ministry published a recruitment-season warning against the scams that trade in it [6].

A market of 12.7 million has run this debate before

The debate is structural, and 2024 already ran the same argument. In September 2024, reports described a 24-year-old physics master's student taking a janitor job at a Suzhou secondary school, and the online response split along the same line, with many calling his choice a waste of education resources and others defending it [4]. The student, Li Yongkang, had earlier received a teaching offer from that school but could not take it up because he had not published enough academic papers to complete his master's degree, so he applied for the janitor post at the school where he had interned and said he would keep waiting for a teaching chance [4]. The market baseline behind the 2024 case comes from two official counts. The Ministry of Education expected 11.79 million graduates in 2024, 210,000 more than the year before [4], and the National Bureau of Statistics put the unemployment rate for ages 16 to 24 excluding students at 18.8 percent in August 2024, up 1.7 percentage points from a month earlier [4]. Two record cohorts, two identical verdicts.

Behind the verdict sits an efficiency intuition: public money funds elite Chinese universities heavily, and the intuition says a subsidized master's degree spent selling balloons is resources put to the wrong use. The employer answered it. After the 2024 reports spread, Wang Jian, Party secretary of the school, said it had consulted with Li and would move him onto its physics teaching team as a teaching assistant [4]. The school that hired a master's student as a janitor treated the degree he was still pursuing as an asset to deploy. One university employment office reads it the same way. Tao Yongfeng, director of the student enrollment and employment guidance office at Xiangtan University, said first jobs that look "not-so-decent" by traditional standards are normal and have become a new trend, with graduates born after 2000 weighing interest, room for growth, work environment and workplace culture more than salary [4].

The ministry's alert names the anxiety trade

Whatever a reader decides about the balloons, the anxiety around the debate is itself for sale. The ministry's warning went out on November 9 under a title that translates as "do not believe you can buy a good job with money" [6]. It describes operators who post fake recruitment messages under the names of state-owned employers, manufacture and sell anxiety, invent fee categories and push loans [6]. Parents get a specific mention: the alert says they care intensely about their children's employment and are easily swayed by anxiety [6].

The warning lists the season's recurring scripts. Paid referral offers sell invented internal quotas, sometimes backed by fabricated chat records and even forged employment contracts, collect fees labeled as referral services or entry deposits, then stall or disappear [6]. Bait postings with abnormal salaries pull applicants from public platforms into private chat groups, where scripted persuasion converts them into paying customers [6]. Training-loan schemes open with a fake job posting, devalue the applicant at the interview, then sell expensive training financed by loans taken on specified platforms, leaving the job seeker in debt before earning anything [6]. Invented charges, from registration fees to deposits, complete the list, and victims may be defrauded again under new labels [6]. The ministry's one-line rule covers all of them: legitimate employers do not charge fees, and recruitment never requires transfers to personal accounts [6].

Official channels carry the volume. The ministry's "hundred-day sprint" campaign from June to August 2026 planned more than 4,000 campus job fairs and over 5 million job postings nationwide, with more than 1.5 million positions listed on the national platform alone [5]. For the current autumn recruitment, the alert directs applicants to four official sites, the National University Student Employment Service Platform, Employment Online, the State-owned Central Enterprises Recruitment Platform and the China Public Recruitment Network, and to campus recruitment events organized by university employment offices [6]. Applicants who do run into a scam are told to keep chat records, agreements and transfer receipts, report to the police, report illegal human-resource services to the labor-supervision authorities, and flag fake postings to the 12377 center run by the Cyberspace Administration of China [6].

The wasted-resources verdict reads a career from its first job

The wasted-resources verdict rests on a meal-ticket idea of education, and Tao Weisheng rejected that idea in his own words. He told The Paper that a diploma is only an outcome, that treating a good school or a good company as a lifelong meal ticket is immature, and that no school and no company can guarantee a person's whole life [1]. He said he has no regrets about selling balloons and considers it a memorable event in his life [1]. The span logic travels: whether a reader is choosing a university in China or weighing one abroad, a degree is judged across a career, and the first job after graduation is where that record starts.

The two cases give the same answer from different sides. In 2024, the employer in the 'wasted degree' case responded by building a teaching role around him [4]. In 2026, the graduate said to have wasted his degree chose work that pays about 3,000 yuan a month in a cohort the ministry expects to number 12.7 million [3], and explained his reasoning in terms any employment office would recognize [1]. A first job is one data point in a career. The 2024 school acted on that reading; in 2026 the graduate argued it himself. Rejecting the verdict means rejecting the shortcut of judging a degree by its first job. The efficiency concern behind the verdict does not disappear with it, and the answer it deserves is the one the 2024 school modeled: put the training where it pays. The wasted-resources verdict reads a whole career from its opening line, and it is the wrong reading. The reading that costs money is a different one: this season's scams are built to convert that anxiety into fees and loans, and the ministry's fee rule, official channels and reporting routes are the practical defense [6].

If you are job-hunting this season

  • Search postings through the four official platforms first, and use the campus recruitment events your university's employment office organizes [6].
  • Treat any request for fees, deposits or transfers to personal accounts, and any guaranteed internship or certificate sold for a high price, as a signal to refuse [6].
  • Verify postings against the employer's official website before trusting social-media accounts, and avoid unknown links and groups [6].
  • Before signing any paid training agreement or loan, check the training provider's license, whether the promised certificate is officially registered, and the loan's lender, rate and repayment terms [6].
  • If a scam does hit, preserve every record and report it [6].

If you are a parent

  • The alert points to parents as a group easily swayed by anxiety over their children's employment; recognize that pressure before responding to any offer [6].
  • Verify every employer and recruiter through official channels before your child pays anything, and hold to the rule that legitimate recruitment never charges fees or accepts transfers to personal accounts [6].
  • Hot-list verdicts like the balloon debate are opinions to weigh; an actual offer is judged on official channels and verifiable documents.