Graduate Jobs Just Fell 55%. My S6 Students Are Asking Me If Any of This Is Worth It.

By Mrs. Lau · 1 November 2025 · 5 min read

I had the conversation last week that I've been half-expecting for months.

It was a revision class, 9pm on a Thursday, three S6 students who'd stayed late to go through past papers. One of them put down her pen and said, flatly: "Miss Lau, I read that graduate vacancies dropped by more than half this year. What are we even doing this for?"

The other two looked at me. I put down my own pen.

Here's the thing: I'm not going to give you the pep talk. You don't need a pep talk. You need an honest answer, and honest answers are what I've been giving students for twenty years, even when they're uncomfortable.

So here is my honest assessment of where we are.

The Numbers Are Real

The 55% drop in graduate vacancies — from roughly 68,700 to 30,800 — is not a statistical blip or media exaggeration. Recruitment consultants confirm it. HR departments confirm it. Youth unemployment for 20-24 year olds reached 12.3% this year, the worst in five years. And the average starting salary for fresh graduates moved less than 1% — HK$20,961 a month, which is a figure that has barely kept pace with the cost of a shared room in Kwun Tong.

My students are right to notice this. The contract that Hong Kong's education system implicitly offered for decades — work hard, pass the exams, get the degree, get the job — has changed materially. I will not pretend otherwise.

Which Pathways Still Have Labour Market Logic

That said, the picture is not uniform. The collapse in graduate hiring has been concentrated in particular sectors and particular types of roles.

Finance, law, accounting, and medicine remain structured hiring pipelines. Graduate intake in these professional fields has contracted, but the underlying demand for qualified practitioners has not evaporated. The barrier to entry remains high and the credential — whether a law degree, accountancy qualification, or medical licence — retains meaningful signal value. Students pursuing these paths through DSE are still playing a game with comprehensible rules.

STEM with genuine technical depth is the other category that holds up. Not "I studied information technology and can use Excel" — but students who have developed real computational thinking, who pursue Maths Extended (M1/M2), who can code and think analytically about data. AI is displacing entry-level analytical roles, but it is creating a different tier of demand for people who can work with AI systems, evaluate their outputs, and build on top of them. That is a technical literacy gap that will persist for a decade at least.

Education, social work, healthcare (non-medicine), and public administration are not high-earning paths, but they are stable ones. AI will restructure these sectors more slowly than it restructures information processing roles. If your child has genuine aptitude and genuine motivation here, the career logic is defensible.

Which Pathways Face Real Structural Problems

I am going to be direct about something that more of my colleagues should say out loud: certain business degree programmes — generic management, business administration without specialisation, communications, and related fields — have been producing graduates into a market that has been contracting for several years. The AI acceleration of this contraction is real. Entry-level report writing, market research synthesis, basic data analysis, administrative coordination — these are the roles that are disappearing, and they are the roles that a large proportion of generic business graduates were filling.

I am not saying do not study business. I am saying: if you are choosing a business degree, you need a specific answer to the question "what will I be able to do that software cannot?" Generic degrees cannot provide that answer, and parents paying HK$100,000 a year in tuition deserve to know that before the enrolment form is signed.

What DSE Results Are Actually Buying in 2026

In 2016, a good DSE result unlocked a degree, and a degree reliably unlocked a graduate starting salary. That was the transaction.

In 2026, a good DSE result still unlocks a degree. But the degree's reliable conversion into employment has weakened significantly outside the professional and technical tracks.

What DSE results still reliably buy: access to university, which provides time, networks, and structured exploration. The students who emerge from university with genuine skills — not just credentials, but things they can actually do — are still employable. The challenge is that acquiring those skills during a degree now requires more intentionality than it did before. You cannot simply attend lectures and collect the credential.

What that means for S6 students sitting across from me right now: the stakes of DSE have not reduced. University access still matters. But the work doesn't stop at the degree. The students who come out of tertiary education as active learners, as people who have done things — research, projects, internships, genuine competencies — will be the ones who find paths in the market that their credentialled-but-passive peers cannot.

The Reframe I Offered My Students

When I put my pen down and looked at those three students on Thursday night, here is what I said.

The people who built this examination system believed — and I think they were right — that the discipline of rigorous study is not just instrumental. It is also formative. A student who can prepare methodically for an eighteen-month examination campaign, who can manage pressure, who can think clearly when she is tired and anxious, who can keep going when the payoff is uncertain — that student has built something real. Those capacities don't disappear because the graduate market contracted.

The question isn't "is the DSE worth it?" The question is what you're trying to get out of it. If you want it to guarantee a job, you may be disappointed — not just by DSE, but by a degree, because neither of those guarantees that anymore. But if you understand it as a platform for developing yourself, for buying time and access and structured challenge, then it is still worth doing, and worth doing well.

That's what I told them. One of them picked her pen back up. The other two took about thirty more seconds.

We finished the past paper.