THE INFLUENCE OF INFORMATION DISPARITY, DISCRIMINATION AND GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION ON JOB SEARCH OUTCOME: DOES GOOD ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE HELPS OUTSTANDING GRADUATES FIND “GOOD JOB”?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:In many societies, conventional wisdom indicates that a person could get a better job through better education. Many people believe that if an individual graduates from a higher-ranked university with better grades, they can lead a more fulfilling career. By better job and more fulfilling career, we refer to 'job appointments' that fit a person's expectations, and pay higher salary in comparison to the salary earned by individuals who received lesser years of formal education.Nevertheless, contradictory opinions have been raised recently in many parts of the society. Recent research conducted by scholars indicates that many fresh graduates end -up holding job appointments that they have no interest (Ng, Shao, & Liu, 2016). Anecdotal evidence from news reports indicate that many graduates from branded universities ended up getting jobs that made them over-qualified. For example, working as butcher and security guards (Sina Hebei, 2013). In addition, the statistics from some countries indicate that college graduates did not earn significantly more than those who received lesser years of formal education. For example, in China, statistics indicate that the difference between the salary earned by fresh graduates after six months of their graduation and the salary of peasant workers has decreased from 33% in 2012 to 21% in 2015 (MyCOS Research Institute, 2013), (MyCOS Research Institute, 2016); (National Bureau of Statistics of the People's Republic of China, 2013), (National Bureau of Statistics of the People's Republic of China, 2016). Thus, it seems like collegial education does not necessarily equate a person with a better job and more fulfilling career.An easy way to challenge this statement is to state the fact that among a typical batch of graduates, when we consider their academic performance, there will always be outstanding students, mediocre students, and bad - performing students. Given that there will always be more mediocre and bad students in comparison to those who are outstanding, it is corollary for us to observe more cases of college students not performing well in their career. For example, the low difference between the salaries of fresh graduates and peasant workers might be due to the presence of outlining data points at the lower ends of the salary distribution. However, this does not mean that those who had outstanding academic performance in college do not have a better job.The current literature on fresh graduate employment has limited capacity in handling this opinion. The literature usually studies the issues of fresh graduate employment from a general perspective i.e., researchers tend not to focus on outstanding graduates to study their career development (Yu & Fan, 2011). Thus, given that there is a limited amount of research conducted on the outstanding student samples, we do not really know if graduates with outstanding academic performance tend to get better jobs. Thus, we conducted the current grounded theory research in China to fill the gap in research. We aimed to contribute to the literature by addressing this research question: Does outstanding graduates tend to end up getting better jobs?LITERATURE REVIEW:In recent years, many scholars have turned their attention towards the issue of graduate students, unable to get their desired jobs (Jia & Sun, 2012); Ng et al., 2016). In order to help alleviate the graduate employment problem, some scholars focused their research efforts on studying the potential mechanisms that could have caused the student employment problem (Yang & Zhu, 2007).In the mainstream literature, there are two contradictory perspectives which both tried to explain why some graduates were unable to secure high quality employment opportunity. While one of the perspectives attributes the cause of graduate employment problem to information obstruction whereas the other perspective attribute the cause of problem to information explosion e. …