Against the backdrop of continued expansion in China’s higher education, intensified employment competition, and the sustained popularity of public sector recruitment and professional qualification examinations, career choices among humanities and social science groups have become more differentiated and increasingly shaped by widely circulated, template like experiences online. This paper addresses a central question in contemporary China: Whether there is an optimal solution for humanities and social science career pathways. Rather than searching for one universally correct answer, we argue that the key is to identify which options are more cost effective, more stable, and more feasible under specific conditions. To do so, we scraped 58,216 public discussion texts from Zhihu and Xiaohongshu covering 2018 to 2025, cleaned them with Python to obtain 41,372 analysable texts, and conducted in depth coding on a sample of 3,200 items. We focused on sequencing recommendations embedded in narratives, such as what to do first, what to do next, and what happens if a window is missed, and then built an age based map of priority tasks. The findings indicate that aged 18 to 22 emphasise building foundations through internships, projects, and portfolios, while also enhancing visibility through competitions and titles. Aged 23 to 27 often treat postgraduate study and entry threshold credentials as key tools for resetting direction and securing access to desired tracks. Aged 28 to 32 enter a stage of competitive differentiation and commonly stress pursuing credentials or professional titles in parallel with accumulating project based capabilities. Aged 33 to 37 focus more on promotion and professional title advancement by completing documentation requirements and managing institutional timing. Aged 38 and above tend to prioritise stabilisation and repositioning, converting experience into management, consulting, or side business products. Further analysis shows that the optimal solution depends not only on age stage, but also on conditions such as industry entry barriers, organisational promotion rules, regional opportunity structures, and family responsibilities. The study provides individuals and universities with an actionable, stage based task map that can help reduce anxiety driven misallocation of effort.
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Gan, W., Xiao, M., Chen, S., Song, X., Mohammed, T. A. (2025) Is There an “Optimal” Career Path for Humanities and Social Science Graduates in China? A Life-course, Cross-platform Text-as-data Study of Task Priority Sequences. Global Education Bulletin, 2(6), 11-28. https://doi.org/10.71052/grb2025/AJDD6336