How to quickly get a job? The transition from higher education to French labour market by a survival model

Abstract

This article analyses how long former university students stay unemployed, when searching for a new job after the leaving of the French higher education. Cox duration models are used to account for the proportional hypothesis. The main result of this article is that the worker's recruitment is based more on the choice of the faculty of initial training than the educational level attainment. Some policy implications are derived from our results to give some recommendations for individual job search and policy-makers in education.

Acknowledgement

Comments by two anonymous referees as well as from Patrice Bougette are gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ There are two types of survival models, the Cox proportional hazard model which assumes that events evolved are proportional along the period and the accelerated hazard models which assume that the events accelerate along the period.

² In particular, in the engineering schools.

³ See Guironnet and Peypoch (2007) for a survey on overeducation measurements.

⁴ This method, much used in the United States, is essentially based on the ‘Dictionary of Occupational Titles’.

⁵ Not displayed but available under request to the authors.

⁶ Which questions the traditional assumption of human capital theory (Section II).

⁷ This fact does not exclude that an executive parent could affect the educational choice of his children.