Student employment rate: Unrealistic due to "formality"

Statistics on the rate of students having jobs after graduation is an important part of the "3 public" content that schools are required to post on their websites according to the requirements of the Ministry of Education and Training. However, after a few years of being urged by the Ministry, the above mentioned part has not been seriously implemented by schools to be able to become the basis for assessing the quality of university training.

Loosely coupled

The situation of university graduates not being able to find jobs has been a difficult problem for many years. According to statistics, in the 3 years from 2009 to 2012, there were nearly 400,000 college students and about 500,000 university students graduating from training systems, of which formal training accounted for about 65%. By the end of 2012, out of a total of 984,000 unemployed people, there were 55.4 thousand people with college degrees (5.6%) and 111.1 thousand people with university degrees or higher (11.3%). Faced with this situation, Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan said that the important reason is that university training institutions have not closely linked with the labor market and have not grasped human resource needs. Enrollment registration and selection of majors and training schools are decided by students themselves, however, they lack information on human resource forecasts, information on the labor market, etc.

Students register to look for jobs at a job fair. Photo: Hai Anh

To partially address the information gap between the parties, since 2009, the Ministry of Education and Training has required schools to announce the rate of students having jobs after graduation and post this information on the school's website in the content of "3 public" (public commitment to training quality, training resources, financial revenue and expenditure). Some schools have implemented this regulation, with results at different levels. Hanoi University of Industry said that about 25% of its students have jobs immediately after graduation, this number increased to 80% after 6 months. Hanoi University of Transport gave a general figure that over 90% of students have jobs after graduation. Ho Chi Minh City University of Law said that the rate of students having jobs after graduation is up to 94.4%. Among students who have jobs, the employment rate immediately after graduation is 85.2%, the number of students who have jobs within 3 to 6 months after graduation is 14.2%.

However, besides detailed figures, information is often just a formality, such as "most students have jobs in their field of study after graduation". Meanwhile, in many university education systems, this is an important criterion. In many countries, university rankings are based on the rate of graduates having jobs with information about jobs, salaries, companies... Data is updated periodically after each school year or annually.

Filling the information gap

Explaining the lack of information, school leaders all said that collecting information is very difficult. Most schools require students to leave their addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses when receiving their diplomas to maintain contact. However, the connection between the two sides is still very loose. A representative of the University of Transport said that up to now, this task has been assigned to each faculty. The faculties are responsible for collecting information about students after graduation and the school still receives annual reports from the faculties. This person also admitted that it is difficult to avoid the situation where many faculties only "do it for the sake of it" because in general, the relationship between the school and students largely depends on a few core students - mainly former class officers. Not to mention that for new graduates, addresses and phone numbers are often unstable, and the information collected is often not highly reliable.

One of the few schools that has done the above work quite thoroughly is Hanoi National University of Education. Director of the school's Center for Testing and Quality Assurance of Education, Mr. Nguyen Cong Khanh, said that the school has been conducting surveys since 2008, including statistics and research on the employment situation with information on jobs, salaries, time to find a job after graduation... The survey was conducted in two phases, one month before students graduated and one or two years later. In 2012, the school distributed 1,692 research samples and 14.9% of those questioned did not respond. Overall, the results after several years show that each year the school has from 1,500 to 2,000 students graduating but only about 35% of students responded to the information.

The above factors lead to the fact that the survey data of schools is often much more optimistic than the actual situation or compared to the employment statistics conducted by state management agencies. This is because the statistics from schools are difficult to cover the entire number of graduates, while the number of students who have not found a job participating in the survey is much lower than the number of students who have a job. Besides, it seems that the statistics of the number of students with jobs means indicating the number of unemployed students, so most schools are reluctant to go into details. Moreover, statistics are not simple, requiring certain human and financial resources. According to Mr. Nguyen Cong Khanh, at Hanoi National University of Education, surveying, statistics, and publishing information requires a large cost, up to 100 million VND per year.

To find a solution to the unemployment situation in general and the statistics on employment in particular, the Government has directed the development of a comprehensive project to solve employment for university and college graduates who are unemployed. Minister Pham Vu Luan also proposed 6 solutions, emphasizing the promulgation of regulations on career guidance and job counseling in educational institutions, organizing employment surveys, and forecasting human resource needs. To date, 150 universities and colleges have established job counseling centers. Basically, statistics are not simply providing data, but also related to many other stages to promote the process of improving training quality, so there needs to be solutions to be seriously implemented in the coming time.

According to HNM