A longitudinal study of perceived employability and psychological health among Chinese college students

The decline in psychological well-being among students in higher education has been increasingly documented. Despite growing recognition of perceived employability as consequential for employees’ well-being in the labor market, less is known regarding its specific association with psychological health among college students approaching the school-to-work transition. This study examined the association between perceived employability and psychological distress among Chinese college students and further explored the variation of this association by gender and family economic condition.

Data were from three consecutive waves of the Panel Survey of Chinese University Students (PSCUS, 2020–2022), tracking 2552 students from their first to their third year. Fixed-effects models were employed to account for unobserved time-invariant characteristics. Interaction models were used to investigate how gender and family economic condition would shape the relationship between perceived employability and psychological distress.

Results showed that higher perceived employability was significantly associated with lower psychological distress. Interaction models further indicated that the association was primarily driven by female and economically disadvantaged students. These findings highlight the need for policymakers to develop career-related programs that enhance students’ perceived employability as a vital means of promoting the psychological well‑being of college students, with particular attention to vulnerable socioeconomic and gender groups.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the PSCUS team for providing the datasets. This research was supported by the Undergraduate Education Teaching Reform and Research Program at Shandong University (grant number: 2025Z01). The research was also supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Project No. 3072025WK1304).

The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, writing of the paper, and the decision to submit the paper for publication. School of Philosophy and Social Development, Shandong University, Jinan, China Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University, No. 145, Nantong Street, Nangang District, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, PR China The authors declare no competing interests. The requirement for ethical approval for this study was waived by the Institute of Sociology in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ethics committee.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.