The influence of perceptions of labour market conditions upon increased demand for postgraduate study.

Abstract

Globally, education systems have increasingly become human rights ‘sensitive’, as they cater for all learners and stakeholders involved in ensuring and maintain equality and fairness for all students and educators. Education remains an important part of the agenda for the government and has unequivocally been part of the international community’s agenda. While, many countries continue to democratise and embrace equality for all, education for all has become steadily democratised, and the more people are getting educated, the more the pressure the labour market exert in hiring the new graduates. While higher education enrolment rates increase, the youth unemployment rates in South Africa continues to increase. As of 2020, the graduate unemployment rates stand at 33.5% for those aged 15 to 24 years and 10.2% among those aged 25 to 34 years. Currently, only over 30% of the youth in South Africa have jobs and about half of them participate in the labour market. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of perceptions on labour market conditions upon the demand for postgraduate enrolment. The quantitative data of this study was collected using the questionnaire research instrument among 190 final year undergraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS® Statistics, which is a statistical platform that allowed the researcher to perform descriptive statistics and regression analysis to understand the correlations and gaps with the dataset. Overall, the results revealed that there is no relationship between the perceptions of labour market conditions, specifically in terms of employment and earnings, and the postgraduate enrolment. This suggest that there are other driving forces that promote and inhibit students to pursue postgraduate studies or join the labour market after finishing an undergraduate study. This study calls for more future research to focus on the real-life experiences of students and high school learner to understand the social, cultural and economic factors that promote and inhibit students from joining the labour market rather than pursuing a postgraduate study after an undergraduate degree.