Wage expectation and overeducation among UMT graduates

Abstract

Several studies related to graduates earnings and prospects have been conducted recently, but unfortunately none of it focuses on graduates earnings expectation and education returns. Therefore, this study is conducted to overcome the gaps, especially in term of using pure primary data. The respondents of this study are final year graduates which obtain economics and sciences courses in Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Those respondents particularly participate in this study a voluntary. Using a simple descriptive analysis, the findings of this study clearly shows difference in term of earnings expectation, earnings information received, educational investments between both types of courses. Furthermore, both types of respondents were also expected to receive positive educational return in future. This study also emphasis the Mincerian earnings function to determine factors cause on earnings expectation and for economics respondents the results is quite surprising because none of the factor indicates through this study cause on earnings expectation compare to science program respondents. All of these results show that, there is different earnings expectation between economics and science stream graduates in UMT but in term of education investment and returns, both with receive positive return in future.