Corresponding Author Affiliation*: Jiaying University, Meizhou, China

Abstract:

The continuous expansion of the scale of higher education has exacerbated the contradiction between the supply and demand of college students’ employment. In the post-epidemic era, college students’ employment in cities is even more difficult. At the same time, the continuous promotion of the rural revitalization strategy faces the talent bottleneck, and the rural development is in urgent need of intellectual support. Promoting college students to go to rural areas for employment is not only a feasible solution to the problem of college students’ employment, but also a reasonable measure to alleviate the contradiction of rural talents. Improving college students’ willingness to work in rural areas is an effective means to promote their rural employment behavior. Therefore, it is very necessary to explore the influencing factors of college students’ willingness to work in rural areas. Based on the push-pull theory, this paper explores the factors that affect college students’ willingness to work in rural areas. The research takes local college graduates in northern Guangdong as the research object, carries out a questionnaire survey, carries out descriptive statistics on the data obtained from the questionnaire, and uses the optimal scale regression to explore the influencing factors of college students’ willingness to work in rural areas. The study found that college students’ willingness to work in rural areas is jointly affected by urban thrust, rural pull, urban pull, rural thrust, individual factors and intermediate barriers. Both the urban pull factor and the rural push factor hinder the college students’ willingness to work in rural areas. Both the urban thrust factor and the rural pull factor promote college students’ willingness to work in rural areas. Among the individual factors and intermediate barriers, family income, cultural differences and distance have a greater impact on college students’ willingness to work in rural areas.

Keywords: Rural employment decision, Push-pull theory, Urban thrust, Rural pull, Urban pull, Rural thrust, Individual factors, Intermediate barriers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37227/ijekm-2023-01-2538/