Long term effect of class attendance on job market of university graduates

• In Event: Student learning and employability in international higher education

Proposal

Existing literature on class attendance in higher education has focused on university students to describe behavior patterns, analyze reasons for skipping classes and prove the linkage between class attendance and learning outcomes (see a meta-analytic review by Crede et al. 2010). The purpose of this study is to extend the investigation to university graduates, a population of interest ignored by previous studies on class attendance. Exploiting the data collected from a large-scale graduate survey, the study aims to link the behavior of class attendance before graduation and the subsequent labor-market outcomes after graduation. The primary assumption underpinning the linkage is to define class attendance as a behavior proxy to self-regulated learning (Pintrich and Zusho 2007) and other non-cognitive abilities such as social conformity and risk aversion. These non-cognitive abilities are persistent, crucial to both academic outcomes in the short term and workplace success in the long term (Heckman et al. 2006).
Based on the data of 26,145 university graduates extracted from China University Graduate Survey (CUGS) in 2015, the study adds new evidence to the existing thread of investigation. Recent studies have found that class attendance is a mediator between individual traits and student outcomes and that the mediating effect is heterogeneous among different subgroups (Dey 2018). Our results reveal that class attendance matters more for students from disadvantaged background. Specifically, female, rural, first-generation students from Midwest China, attend vocational colleges and study non-STEM programs (social science and humanities) are likely to attend classes more regularly. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the behavior pattern of class attendance predicts job quality of university graduates. To be specific, class attendance is positively associated with job satisfaction and negatively associated with job turnover and annual salary within six years after graduation. Further sensitivity checks indicate that our findings are robust across different subgroups and several model specifications.

Author

• Jiao Guo, East China Normal University