By By Lim CJ
I refer to Over 90% of fresh grads from 2012 cohort employed. The startling revelation of this news article was that their starting salaries were above $3000.
While it might be true for graduates in pharmacy, law, medicine and architect, the reverse cannot be said for the students of the other disciplines.
Each job vacancy can attract more than 50 applications and HR may shortlist about 10 people for 1 position, followed by another round. And on frequent occasions, the advertisements re-advertise again if they are unable to find suitable applicants.
If that is true, it is implausible that 90% of fresh graduates can find jobs within 6 months and earning such high salaries.
Gainfully employed graduates will be more than happy to fill up the survey findings and might inflate their salary to boost their ego. While the unemployed fresh graduates would usually be not in the mood to fill up these surveys. I remember when I was unemployed, I threw the survey away as I was busy job hunting. Therefore there is a possibility that this painted picture is skewed and inaccurate.
I believe that many unemployed PMETs have registered themselves in WDA’s CDC, e2i and Caliberlink and their sheer numbers will question these statistics.
I would like to propose that these graduates need to declare their place of employment for record purposes.
In addition, most universities have a vested interest to inflate their figures to improve their image. I would therefore like to propose that an independent audit firm to audit these survey findings to provide a more balanced and neutral result from the surveys.