SUMMER: Bias-aware Prediction of Graduate Employment Based on Educational Big Data

Abstract

The failure of obtaining employment could lead to serious psychosocial outcomes such as depression and substance abuse, especially for college students who may be less cognitively and emotionally mature. In addition to academic performance, employers’ unconscious biases are a potential obstacle to graduating students in becoming employed. Thus, it is necessary to understand the nature of such unconscious biases to assist students at an early stage with personalized intervention. In this paper, we analyze the existing bias in college graduate employment through a large-scale education dataset and develop a framework called SUMMER (bia S -aware grad U ate e M ploy ME nt p R ediction) to predict students’ employment status and employment preference while considering biases. The framework consists of four major components. Firstly, we resolve the heterogeneity of student courses by embedding academic performance into a unified space. Next, we apply a Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) to overcome the label imbalance problem of employment data. Thirdly, we adopt a temporal convolutional network to comprehensively capture sequential information of academic performance across semesters. Finally, we design a bias-based regularization to smooth the job market biases. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale educational dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction framework.