The first chapter analyses private demand for university education. In this study, those polled said that the main reason for going to university was to have more opportunities to find a job as graduates. Precisely, due to the high rates of youthful unemployment, the opportunity cost of studying at the university nowadays is, or in the last years has been, lower. Even many students can perceive that their stay at the university brings an “opportunity benefit” if gaining a degree alleviates bad employment expectations. This factor, compounded by the fact that the direct cost of obtaining university education in Spain is relatively low, has caused the demand for university studies to grow in spectacular fashion in the last decade of the 20th century. Besides labour market conditions, the results of the microeconometric models estimated by the author show that the parents´ educational level, the family income and the cost of university education are variables that significantly influence the amount (and type) of formal human the young decide to accumulate once they have finished Secondary Education.
The second chapter studies the activity of employment search. It is evident that finding the first employment not only depends on individual features such as school ability (the academic record), that allows a fast labour insertion, but also on the degree they have studied. Graduates of degrees in which the consumption element of the education is high, like Humanities, can find their knowledge difficult to “sell” in the labour market. Therefore, certain university qualifications have a relative advantage in the labour market. It all invites to think that education differentiates and divides the youth up acting as a “filter” appropriate to the employers´ interests. In the analysis of employment insertion they have observed, likewise, people find their first employment thanks to personal relations and self-employment. Personal relations (informal methods) are always more effective to find a vacancy than formal ones, as they lower the costs of employment search and provide a more complete information on the characteristics of the posts. Instead, the use of formal methods, such as direct search (press advertisements, curriculum, etc.), is always more expensive (in time and money) and less effective (less probabilities of getting the post). However, depending on the degree and the type of work searched, graduates develop different search channels.
In the last three chapters the author deals with the relationship university education-employment, studying, among other aspects: graduates´ conditions from an educational point of view when it comes to joining the labour market, the satisfaction degree in relation with the salary received, employment security and the perspectives of making progress in the company (promotion possibilities), how much information they receive in their work and which are the salary levels. Here, the author observes how the graduates receive the fruit of the education investment they made when they were young, confirming that there is a positive correlation between the educational levels reached and the salary levels obtained.
About the author: Manuel Salas Velasco is an education economist and professor of the Department of Applied Economics of the University of Granada. At present he holds a postdoctoral Fulbright scholarship in the University of Columbia, NYC, United States.
Further information: salas-velasco@tc.columbia.edu
