The aim of this study was to conduct an empirical analysis of how cooperative education and internships affect job matching and entrance into the labor market. The existing studies mostly involve empirical analyses of wages and job matching, of tenure...
The aim of this study was to conduct an empirical analysis of how cooperative education and internships affect job matching and entrance into the labor market. The existing studies mostly involve empirical analyses of wages and job matching, of tenure and job matching, and of labor migration. Recently, government entities and companies have been actively operating cooperative education and internship programs, but there has not been much research on the specific economic effects generated from these programs. In this study, an empirical analysis is made of the effects of cooperative education and internship programs on job matching and entrance into the labor market, and policy suggestions are made based on the results.
The data for this study was gathered through questionnaires given to new employees along with "Survey Companies Satisfaction with University Education," which was, in 2006, distributed to 532 national manufacturing and service companies by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training. In terms of the analysis methods, for job matching, the Logit model was used, and for entrance to the labor market, the linear regression model was used.
The analysis results are as follows:
First, the effect of cooperative education and internship experience on job matching varies according to college majors. For the case of humanities and social science majors, cooperative education and internships positively influence major matching. In the analysis of job satisfaction, the results only showed a positive effect for internship. For engineering majors, the results for both cooperative education and internships did not show enough statistical significance to suggest a major matching. In terms of job satisfaction, only the results for cooperative education showed a positive result.
Second, the analysis of the data on entrance to the early labor market showed that cooperative education and internship experience shortens the period of job adaptation, but only cooperative education shortens the period needed to find a first job. In terms of the duration of time before college graduation, cooperative education shortens this period, but internship lengthens it.
Third, the duration of time before college graduation is shortened two months by cooperative education, but is lengthened two to three months by an internship.
The limitations of this study are: there was no analysis of operation subjects of cooperative education and internship, it was not considered that students who have experienced cooperative education and internship can have more selection advantages than those who do not, and the period of cooperative education and internship was not divided into the two periods of before and after college graduation. Another limitation of this study is that the data used did not cover all the national cooperative education programs and internships, and of the participants, the percentages of workers who had experienced cooperative education and internships were 28.5% and 10.7%, respectively.