Administrative Visibility and Social Sustainability in University-to-Work Transitions: Evidence from Economic-Hardship Records at a Chinese University

Equitable transitions from higher education into work are part of social sustainability, yet institutional records often collapse application, review, award, payment and follow-up. We examined whether an observed pre-final-year aid record was conditionally associated with early graduate-transition records among hardship applicants at a Chinese university. De-identified linked records identified 94 applicants across two cohorts; excluding one final-year-only record yielded a primary comparison of 69 applicants with an observed pre-final-year record and 24 with no observed aid-disbursement record. Outcomes were market employment, destination placement, applicable log salary and major–job matching. The main HC3 models adjusted only for sex and cohort, whose temporal ordering is unambiguous in the available records. Rural hukou coding, household income and cumulative hardship-record count were moved to sensitivity analyses because their strict pre-exposure timing could not be verified from the extracts. Main adjusted associations were 0.028, −0.015, 0.046 log points and −0.388 score points; all 95% intervals crossed zero. The estimates do not identify an aid effect. They show how a selectively generated institutional record can be used to audit support-pathway visibility and the limits of administrative evidence for equitable transition.