Graduate labour market outcomes and satisfaction with university education in Spain

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the association between the job placement results of graduates and the satisfaction that, retrospectively, they express about their university education. Despite the fact that, in Spain, 47.0% of the population aged 25 to 34 has a higher education degree, we have little knowledge of the determinants of university student satisfaction. In addition, most studies have focused on evaluating the university experience (teaching activity, study plans, counselling for students, or facilities) and very few of them have taken into account the influence of graduates’ labour market outcomes on their satisfaction. This issue is of particular interest in the Spanish case, considering the dysfunctional nature of the youth labor market, which has high rates of overqualification, excessive job turnover and high unemployment. The sources of statistical information used in this work include the first two editions of the "University Graduate Job Placement Survey", carried out by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE) in 2014 and 2019. The methodology used in the empirical work is the propensity score matching estimator. The results of empirical analysis indicate that graduates’ job placement difficulties have a significant association with their dissatisfaction with their university experience. In particular, educational mismatch (horizontal and vertical) and, to a lesser extent, unemployment and low wages significantly increase the probability of graduates stating that, if they had to start over, they would not return to university or they would not study the same degree.