Due to the shrunken labor market resulted from the recent recession, the number of unemployed youth is increasing. Among them, college graduates' unemployment has emerged as an important social issue. Unemployment crisis has a great effect especially ...
Due to the shrunken labor market resulted from the recent recession, the number of unemployed youth is increasing. Among them, college graduates' unemployment has emerged as an important social issue. Unemployment crisis has a great effect especially on the employment rate for new female college graduates and the quality of their employment. Female college students are preparing to acquire the qualifications as a means of increasing the chances of their participating in economic activities.
Qualifications can be acquired at relatively low opportunity cost and they can be effectively used as data for objective verification of human resource. However, the studies about the activities where most students participate and about the effect of the female college students' qualifications on early employment after the graduation are inadequate. Thus, this study aims to design the schemes to improve the utilization of female college students' qualifications in the employment market through the basic study on the qualifications which female college students acquire while in college.
This study aims to empirically analyze the effect of qualifications on the early labor market. To this end, the panel date from the survey about the vocational route for college graduates in 2009 by the Korea Employment Information Service (2008 GOMS1) was used. 7,539 female students who graduated from colleges in Aug 2007 or in Feb 2008 were targeted for an analysis. Cross-tabs, t-test, ANOVA, logistic regression analysis, and multiple regression analysis were performed for the analysis of the effect of the qualifications on employment, wage, and job satisfaction in the early labor market.
As a result of the analysis, the qualification retention rate was 76.5% (5,770 students), which was much higher than those with no qualification 23.5%, (1,769 students). As for the type of school, the qualification retention rate in the college of education was the highest, and those who received job training course had more qualifications.
This study has analyzed the effect of the qualification by dividing the qualifications into 3 types (national qualification, civil qualification, foreign qualification) and 5 types (national qualification, national technical qualification, state-authorized qualification, non-state-authorized qualification, foreign qualifications), beside the analysis of the qualification effect depending on the presence of qualification. As a result, as for the analysis of qualification effect, there was a positive effect on employment, wages, and job satisfaction, yet the findings from the study was opposite to each other depending on the type of qualification. In other words, when the qualifications are divided into 3 types, there was no significant effect on employment, wage, and job satisfaction. But when the civil certifications were analyzed with foreign qualification after subdividing the national certifications into national certifications and national technical certifications and dividing the civil certifications into state-authorized civil certifications and non-state-authorized certifications, there was a positive effect on employment, wage, and job satisfaction. These findings indicate female college student's acquiring qualifications has a positive effect on the early labor market, yet the effect is likely to vary according to the type of qualification.
Regulating various variables which may have an effect on the employment of female college students and their wage for quantitative approach, this study was limited to the effect of the qualifications only on employment, wage and job satisfaction in the early labor market in accordance with the presence of the qualifications. To supplement the limitations in this study, it is needed to conduct a qualitative study considering a variety of variables which may have effects of the female college student's entering the early labor market.