According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP), Dongnam University, located in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China, posted a notice on its official website on the 22nd to recruit cafeteria office managers.
Dongnam University is one of the top universities included in the 985 and 211 courses, a project to foster prestigious universities by the Ministry of Education of China, and is highly evaluated at home and abroad.
However, the announcement of hiring a cafeteria manager sparked controversy by specifying “doctoral degree holders” as one of the qualifications.
The job is to manage the overall operation of the restaurant, and specifically includes diet development and supervision, restaurant outsourcing management, food safety checks, and administrative paperwork.
Applicants must be proficient in English and office software, and their experience in related work and whether they are members of the Communist Party are also specified as preferential conditions.
Chinese Internet users criticize such demands for higher education as excessive.
One Internet user said, “This is the result of ‘internal power’.” “Internal power” is a Chinese expression that refers to a social phenomenon in which fair compensation is not followed even in the face of excessive competition.
Recently, young people in China are facing the reality that it is difficult to find satisfactory jobs even with high educational backgrounds.
According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate for young people aged 16 to 24 in cities, excluding students, stood at 15.8% as of April, down slightly from 16.5% in March, but still high.
Regarding the controversy, a university official explained, “The applicant does not have to be a chef, but it is just preferential treatment for food, nutrition, and cooking majors and those with cooking certificates.”
The annual salary of the job is about 180,000 yuan, which is in accordance with Chinese national standards.
As of 2023, the average annual salary of workers in the urban non-private sector was about 124,000 yuan and that of the private sector was about 69,000 yuan.
Some are raising suspicions that the announcement was a “customized recruitment” for certain people. “It is too coincidental that there is someone with a doctorate degree and a culinary certificate,” some said. “Isn’t there a nominee already?”
Restaurant managers at prestigious universities are called “golden rice bowls” due to stable jobs and welfare benefits, and have a high competition rate. As a result, voices calling for transparency and fairness in the hiring process are growing.
SOPHIA KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
