More than half of those who graduated in the summer of 2009 were employed one year after leaving college, although a significant percentage were still unemployed, according to the results of a poll published yesterday.
The poll came at a time when the influx of first-time jobseekers during the graduation season is likely to push up the nation’s unemployment rate from May to August.
Based on the poll, which was conducted by the Center for Educational Research and Evaluation at National Taiwan Normal University, 51.7 percent of the 2009 graduates were employed one year after graduation, while 10.2 percent were unemployed.
The unemployment rate reached 4.12 percent in May, compared with 4.1 percent in April, with the number of first-time jobseekers failing to attain employment rising by 2,000 from the previous month, according to the latest government data available.
Meanwhile, 7.5 percent of the 2009 graduates included in the survey were not seeking jobs, 24.1 percent were pursuing higher education and 5.4 percent were completing their compulsory military service, the poll showed.
The university center noted in the poll that the unemployed rate one year after completing university had dropped for the 2009 graduates compared with the 13.9 percent of those who graduated in 2007.
It also found that the number of those who were not seeking jobs had grown by 2.8 percent from the 4.7 percent recorded in 2007.
Researchers at the center attributed the rise to the growing number of people preparing for entry tests for government jobs and for jobs with state-run firms, which are seen as more stable options in the uncertain economic environment of the past few years.
Yesterday, a total of 37,632 people took the test held by the state-owned Chunghwa Post Co (中華郵政) seeking to fill one of the 1,445 vacancies being offered by the company, with a salary of between NT$28,000 and NT$43,000 a month.
The questionnaires were distributed between August and December last year among 257,627 students who graduated in the summer of 2009, with a response rate of 52 percent.
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