The average employment rate of last year's university and graduate school graduates was found to be 70.3%. Among major disciplines, only medicine and engineering exceeded the average employment rate.
On the 26th, the Ministry of Education and the Korean Educational Development Institute announced the results of the '2023 Higher Education Institution Graduates Employment Statistics Survey.'
The statistical survey analyzed 646,062 graduates from Aug. 2022 and 2nd.
According to the survey results, 389,668 out of all graduates were employed, recording an employment rate of 70.3%. Compared to the previous year's survey, this is an increase of 0.7 percentage points, marking the first time it has exceeded 70%.
However, the Ministry of Education noted that from this year's survey, it is difficult to make a simple comparison with the previous year, as it includes broadcasting and communication universities, cyber universities, remote universities, and technical colleges. The previous survey targeted general universities, educational universities, industrial universities, technical colleges, various schools, and general graduate schools.
By type, workplace health insurance subscribers accounted for 88.5%, followed by freelancers (7.4%), individual startups or businesses (2.9%), overseas employment (0.6%), and individual creative activity workers (0.5%).
By school type, graduate schools recorded 82.4%. This was followed by technical colleges (72.4%), general universities (64.6%), and educational universities (59.5%).
By discipline, medicine (82.1%) and engineering (71.9%) exceeded the average employment rate. In contrast, education (69.5%), social sciences (69.4%), arts and physical education (67.2%), natural sciences (66.5%), and humanities (61.5%) fell short of the average employment rate.
By gender, males had a rate of 72.4% and females 68.5%. The gender gap was 3.9 percentage points, up from 3.0 percentage points the previous year.
By region, the employment rate of schools in metropolitan areas was 72.2%, higher than schools in non-metropolitan areas, which stood at 68.5%. The regional gap was 3.7 percentage points, an increase of 1.0 percentage points from the previous year's 2.7 percentage points.
Shim Min-cheol, director of talent policy planning at the Ministry of Education, said, “We will strive to continuously contribute to data-driven talent policy development by linking various administrative data and reflecting the opinions of policy consumers.”