Job seekers speak with recruiters at Hefei University in Hefei, Anhui province, at a job fair for college graduates. (Photo: Xinhua)

The number of new college graduates is expected to reach a record 8.34 million this year, an increase of 140,000 from last year, but there are still relatively sufficient job options for them, a report said.

The CIER index, designed by the China Institute for Employment Research and Zhaopin in 2011 to monitor China's job climate, is 1.41 for new college graduates this year, which means the job vacancies faced by every of them is 1.41 on average, according to a recent report by recruitment website Zhaopin.

The index is slightly down from 1.54 of last year.

In the three months after this year's Spring Festival, the number of job vacancies for college graduates dropped 13 percent from the same period of last year, while the number of job seekers decreased 5 percent, according to the report.

The report, based on Zhaopin's online recruitment big data and a survey of 88,150 college graduates, said the decline was greater than that of job seekers, which was the reason for the cooler job climate.

The survey found that college graduate's salary expectations has increased from last year, with 32.39 percent of them expecting a monthly salary between 6,000 to 7,999 yuan and 24.86 percent of them expecting a monthly salary between 4,000 to 5,999 yuan.

In practice, there is a rise in their actual contract monthly salary compared to that of last year, but the gap between expectation and reality still exits.

The contract monthly salary is within 6,000 yuan for 70 percent of this year's college graduates and is below 4,000 yuan for 35.77 percent of them.

Last year, 60 percent of college graduates had a contract monthly salary less than 4,000 yuan and 34.62 percent of them only earned 3,000 yuan and below in contract monthly salary.

The new first-tier cities, with relatively low cost of living and rising job opportunities, remain college graduates' top destination for jobs, accounting for 44.18 percent, an increase of 4 percentage points year-on-year, the report said.

First-tier cities are also becoming more attractive as 30.63 percent of surveyed college graduates expect to find a job there, which is higher than last year.