A study of the effect of financial robot popularity on employment anxiety of accounting students in Luoyang City, China

In the context of the accelerated replacement of basic accounting positions by financial robots (RPA) (the global voucher entry automation rate reaches 92%), accounting students in Luoyang, a typical second-tier city with 63% of manufacturing industry, face the double pressure of lagging industrial transformation and disconnected skills education. Through a questionnaire survey of accounting students in four universities in Luoyang, this study analysed 19 valid samples and found that: students' employment anxiety shows significant structural characteristics, with skills anxiety being the most prominent (52.64% of students worry that the course content is out of line with the actual needs of enterprises), geographical opportunity anxiety being the second most important (47.37% think that local jobs are highly competitive), and direct substitution fear accounting for only 31.58%. The study reveals for the first time the "geographical information black hole effect" - all respondents are not aware of the RPA application cases in local enterprises (e.g. YITO Group), but 78.94% of them anticipate the growth of the demand for intelligent accounting in the manufacturing industry, which creates a sharp contradiction between perception and confidence. Empirical analyses showed that 93.75% of students (self-assessment score ≤ 3) with insufficient knowledge of RPA tended to overestimate the risk of substitution, and this assessment was significantly and positively correlated with anxiety levels (r=0.58, p=0.079). Notably, the internship experience demonstrated buffering value, with a 23.8% reduction in the proportion of students with skills anxiety who had been exposed to a semi-automated system. Based on this, this study proposes a three-dimensional countermeasure framework of "penetrating the black box of information-accurate coupling of industry and education", which includes the establishment of a mandatory disclosure mechanism for local RPA cases by the government, the development of a sand table practical training course for manufacturing scenarios in colleges and universities, and the implementation of a certificate-job matching subsidy system by the government and the university, which provides a practical path for similar industrial cities to solve the talent anxiety in the process of technological transformation.