BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- A growing number of Chinese university graduates are leaving first-tier cities for second-tier ones for lower living costs and easier access to local hukou, or household registration status, Tuesday's China Daily reported.

In 2019, 20 percent of college graduates chose to work in first-tier cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, down six percentage points from 2015, the newspaper cited data from the Chinese Four-Year College Graduates' Employment Annual Report (2020).

While the proportion of college graduates who chose to work in one of the top 10 second-tier cities, such as Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang Province and Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan Province, rose to 26 percent in 2019 from 22 percent in 2015.

A similar trend was also spotted among Chinese vocational college graduates, the newspaper said, citing a separate Chinese Three-Year Vocational College Graduates' Employment Annual Report (2020).

While graduates from first-tier cities had the highest job satisfaction rate, with Shanghai topping the list with 76 percent and Beijing ranking second with 75.8 percent, second-tier cities like Hangzhou also had a high job satisfaction rate of 75.2 percent, figures from the report show.

The reports, released by MyCOS, an education consulting and research institute in Beijing, were based on a survey of 274,000 graduates from 30 provincial-level regions.