Anxious and Adrift: Unveiling the Digital Voices of China’s Highly Educated NEETs

Recent media in China has highlighted the rise of ‘full-time children’—youth who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) and are financially dependent on parents. This group is expected to shrink due to educational expansion, which provides youth with enhanced opportunities for employment. However, China has seen a growing cohort of college-educated NEETs, a group largely overlooked in earlier studies focusing on lower-educated NEETs. Since this group is neither studying nor employed, traditional methods of locating them through schools or labour markets are ineffective.

This study examines the experiences, aspirations, and perceptions of these highly educated NEETs by analyzing their discussions on a major Chinese forum. Using a large language model, this study performed topic modeling and sentiment analysis on a dataset of over 50,000 posts and one million replies from NEET-related discussion groups (2020–2024). Analysis identified eight key topics: employment pressure and job search challenges, career planning and transition, academic pressure and studying abroad, workplace stress and challenges, family and life stress, social and emotional struggles, psychological stress and personal growth, and health and self-management. Sentiment analysis reveals that over 75% of discussions were negative. Employment pressure and job search challenges have been a prominent theme and emerged as the most discussed topic in 2024. In contrast, academic pressure, a major theme in 2020, declined sharply after 2022 and became one of the least-discussed topics by 2024. Psychological stress, though less frequently discussed, exhibited the highest proportion of negative sentiment.

This study contributes to the literature by shedding light on the under-researched phenomenon of highly educated NEETs, revealing their unique challenges and emotional struggles. It also demonstrates the value of online forum data and computational methods for studying hard-to-reach populations, advancing understanding of youth unemployment and mental well-being in the digital age