Higher Education and Employment: An International Comparative ...

Higher Education and EmploymentThis overall importance of career opportunities varies again accordingto the socio-economic background of the individual. In the FederalRepublic of Germany for example, the career prospects become moreimportant for students who are male, urban and have parents with high*ncome and high-level professional and educational background. Similarly,in France, the largest group of students in the faculty of medicine (42.7 percent) came from a highly placed socio-professional group, 27.4 per cent ofthe entrants to university had high-level executive parents6 and themajority of the students of psychology (67.3 per cent) and classicalliterature (86.7 per cent) were female. These figures indicate that employmentand career are more important for high status students and males.In the non-market economies like the USSR and Poland, there is somedifference in the attitude towards higher education. Wards of peasants,industrial workers and white-collar cadres attach different degrees ofimportance to the socio-professional status achieved thrc Jgh higher education.As shown in Table 2 the white-collar families in Poland dominate thesystem of higher education whereas peasants' wards are the least numerous.Although education as a whole has the highest importance in raisingsocial status, the attractiveness of different disciplines varies for boys andg;r1s. Girls are less attracted to career-oriented courses than boys, whichindicates that the sex of the individual influences the demand for thevarious types of higher education. This will be discussed further when wedeal with the demand for specific disciplines.Second group of countries Those of the countries studied which enjoy asomewhat less favourable relationship between higher education andemployment are Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, PDR Yemen,Peru, Philippines, Tanzania, and Zambia. In this group of countries careerand employment opportunities come out as the most dominant factor fordetermining demand for higher education (see Table 3). In Tanzania, 95per cent of the students surveyed indicated that good employmentopportunities and a wide choice of careers were the most important reasonsfor their pursuit of higher education.4 For the other countries this figurevaried from 57 per cent (Sri Lanka) to 86 per cent (Philippine ) (see Table3). A large majority of the individuals cite career opportunities as thedeterminant of lemand for higher education. In Democratic Yemen, whereemployment is guaranteed even for a secondary school graduate, anotherimportant factor is the contribution of higher education to social prestige,which accounts for 22 per cent of the cases. Social prestige being the resultof improved socio-professional status acquired through higher education, itbecomes related tc the career aspect of higher education. This phenomenonis ver similar to that of an industrialized socialist country such as Poland orUSSR.One can also observe that differences in socio-economic status influencethe demand for higher education. In the Philippines and India,3645