Higher Education and Employment: An International Comparative ...

Higher Education and Employmentnote the effects of socio-economic and educational characteristics on theearnings and success in the career of the graduates. This can show whatrole education plays in the redistribution of income among graduates,which is one of its important functions, according to the human capitaltheorists.Most of the analysis has been based on simple cross-tabulations,frequency distributions and chi-square statistics to calculate the degree ofassociation among different characteristics. For the earnings functions, onecan carry out regression analysis. Once the list of hypotheses has beendetermined (based on the checklist of questions mentioned previously) andthe method of analysis decided upon, the data on the graduates arecollected by means of a questionnaire survey conducted with a representativesample of employed graduates. The details of the sampling techniqueand the organization of the survey are given in the next section.The employability of graduates also depends on the relationshipbetween the employers and the institutions of higher education, and therecruitment and promotion system practised by the employers. Theimportance of the different methods of recruitment is determined bysurveying a sample of employers giving them a scale of reference for eachmethod. The mechanisms which could improve the interaction between theemployers and the institutions are identified with the help of a checklistof such mechanisms, asking the employers to give their score for each ofthem. The difference in the recruitment and selection criteria for differenttypes of labour market (public, private, etc.) can be analysed with crosstabulationsand chi-square statistics. For different types of labour market,the mechanisms of interaction may be different. This can also be identifiedby the score each type of labour market assigns to the different mechanisms.The average score with the standard deviation may indicate thepreferred mechanism for each type of labour market.Differences in wage structure influence the choice of a job by thegraduates. An analysis of the minimum starting salary of the different typesof employer and the criteria for fixing the minimum salary provides usefulinformation for analysing the relation between salaries offered and thelevel and type of education. This analysis is again done by simple crosstabulationsand chi-square statistics, and the computation of average andstandard deviations. Finally, an analysis is made of the concordance of theperceptions of the employers and graduates regarding the characteristics ofa job, to identify areas where the degree of mismatch is excessive so that theimportance of better interaction among the employers and employees canbe shown by empirical evidence, and methods of corrective action can bedevised. This analysis is done by assigning scores to each one in a set ofidentified characteristics according to its importance in making the jobsatisfactory. Simple measures of association are used as statistics for thisanalysis. The data on the employers are collected in the same way as dataon the students and graduates.24331,