BUSY DAY: On January 1, students in Weifang University, Shandong Province, cram for postgraduate entrance exams, which were held on January 5 (ZHANG CHI)

Wang Lina, who holds a master's degree from Wuhan University in central China's Hubei Province, once firmly believed that the qualification would land her a stable and highly-paid job.

Yet after failing to nail down a job after attending more than 40 job fairs since graduating last summer, her confidence is waning. She managed to get her foot in the door at a well-known real estate development company in Wuhan, the provincial capital. However, she was turned down after an interview for being overqualified.

Grim prospects for master's degree holders presented Wang with a dilemma: Holding out for a long shot at a position suiting her advanced academic qualifications, or omitting her postgraduate credentials from her resume and seek employment as a humble baccalaureate. Wang chose the latter.

Six decades ago, eight out of 10 Chinese people were unable to read and write. Now the country faces a different conundrum: A growing number of people in economically developed regions blame their job-hunting difficulties on a surplus of education.

Degree depreciation

University students were rare in China when the government launched its reform and opening-up policy and resumed the national college entrance examination in the late 1970s. Official data show that in 1977, only 3.4 percent of applicants were admitted into regular institutes of higher learning.

A university degree can dramatically change a person's future, especially for rural students. In the 1980s, university graduates were assigned jobs, usually decent ones in cities, by the government.

Since 1999, the government has dramatically expanded university enrollment. Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that in 1998, 1.08 million students, or 34 percent of those taking the national college entrance examination, were admitted into undergraduate programs. In 1999, 1.6 million students, or 48 percent of applicants, were accepted. Enrollment continued to rise through 2012, when 6.85 million students, or 75 percent of applicants, entered universities.

The Ministry of Education issued a regulatory circular last year announcing an end to the expansion of undergraduate enrollment.

The sharp increase in university enrollment has resulted in a large number of graduates competing for a limited amount of white-collar jobs. The China Labor Market 2012 Report released by Beijing Normal University last November revealed that currently, a surplus of college graduates and a shortage of migrant workers doing physical work coexist in the labor market.

Meanwhile, enrollment in graduate programs has risen too. Data from the Ministry of Education show that enrollment in postgraduate programs doubled since 2003, reaching 584,000 students in 2012.

In recent years, master's degree holders have faced an increasingly tight job market. Official statistics exhibit that from 2009 to 2011, the employment rate of fresh master's degree holders was below that of bachelor holders.

As a result, a number of master's degree holders in China have raised eyebrows by competing for manual jobs that conventionally do not require university education.