60% of next year's college graduates secure jobs60% of next year's college graduates secure jobs

More than half of the college students who will graduate next March had found jobs as of Oct. 1, while some 171,000 graduating students are believed to still be struggling to gain employment, according to a poll by the labor and education ministries released Friday.

While those who have landed a position at 59.9 percent are up by 2.3 percentage points from the same point last year, when the figure fell to its lowest level since the survey was first conducted in 1996, the number is still low compared with the early 2000s — a period bleak enough to be dubbed the "employment ice age.".

Among students at national and prefectural universities, 67.4 percent of the former had found jobs, up 4.2 points from a year earlier, as had 57.4 percent of the latter. The poll found 61.7 percent of male students found work, up 2.2 points, and 57.7 percent of females, up 2.4 points.

The rate for students at two-year junior colleges came to 22.7 percent, up 0.2 point.

Meanwhile, 41.5 percent of high school seniors who want to work after graduation had found jobs as of the end of September.

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