The Signalling Effect of TNE Degrees: Are Graduates from Sino-Foreign Joint Universities Favoured in the Graduate Labour Market?

China’s expansion in higher education, while leading to a significant rise in university graduates, has resulted in an oversupply which outpaces the growth of high-skill job opportunities. This phenomenon, known as ‘Nei Juan’ (the vicious competition) in Chinese, has led to degree inflation, or diminishing degree value, due to their proliferation. Signalling theory suggests that individuals invest in education as an indicator of their ‘unobservable abilities’ to employers when firms receive insufficient information on candidates in recruitment. Accordingly, higher education qualifications become a signal or ‘sorting machine’ for employers to differentiate between candidates. Sino-foreign joint universities, as a unique mode of TNE, offer students a ‘double identity’ as local and international graduates in this case, but the potential benefits of this double identity in the graduate labour market have been less explored in the Chinese context. This research employs quantitative and qualitative data to examine the impact of joint university degrees in the Chinese labour market, yielding mixed results. These findings enhance the understanding of the influence of TNE on students’ personal and career development and make a theoretical contribution to the contextual meaning of signalling in international higher education.