Wang Yingjie, who graduated from the Minzu University of China in Beijing in 2009, prepares for this year's post-graduate exam in her rented apartment near the school in this 2010 file photo. Living on school resources is a way of cutting living costs for many school drifters like Wang. Yin Yafei / for China Daily

Get a college degree and you'll go far? Ye Dong made it to a 10-square-meter place, at 60 yuan (7 euros) a month, neighboring his old college in Shaoguan, Guangdong province. Now 23, Ye earned his diploma in June 2010. But he hardly steps farther from the campus, still eating in the dining hall and studying in classrooms. Living close to it is convenient and familiar, he says.

Around almost every college and university in China are cheap apartments and bungalows for rent, where lots of graduates like Ye live, according to Hu Jiewang, a sociology professor at Jiaying University in Guangdong province. They live and look like enrolled students, but they aren't.

Hu published a first research paper on these graduates in 2003 and named them "school-drifters". It became a popular search keyword and triggered wide media coverage and further academic research.

"The number is increasing over the years," Hu says. "A simple reasoning is that each year the total graduates are increasing, while the employment rate is not seeing big changes. A large portion of the unemployed become school-drifters. Some previously employed also come back after a short unsatisfying working period."

In 2005, researcher Shi Xu of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics said in a published paper that the number of school-drifters had reached 100,000. Hu says "it is hard to calculate an accurate total", but he thinks the current number should have far exceeded that.