China grads hold low entrepreneurship passion

People.cn published on Thursday a university rank on fresh graduate start-ups based on its 2013 University Employment Situation Report released in April. Its data were collected from 75 universities directly under the Ministry of Education.

Only 14 universities out of the 75 have revealed their entrepreneurship rate out of all new graduates with the average rate hitting about one percent of all total graduates from 2013.

The entrepreneurship rate of all undergraduates from Zhejiang University is 4.16 percen, the highest of the 14 universities, and Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) ranks second with a rate of 1.38 percent. As for the graduates, including Master's and Doctoral graduates, Donghua University (DHU) has the highest rate at 3.32 percent and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) follows with a rate of 2.38 percent.

With the biggest number of start-up graduates in China, Zhejiang University covers a big part of the annual report on the measures it makes to encourage graduates to be self-employed. Besides providing guidance on how to create a start-up business, it provides more than 30 courses on start-ups and has strategic partnerships already in place with local privately-owned corporations in the province.

In recent years, the government has continuously published series of preferential policies to support start-up businesses by new graduates. However, it stills has room to improve compared to other developed countries like the US, which boasts an entrepreneurship rate of 20 percent.

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