Parents' income affects children on job status

By Chung Hyun-chae

Children from low-income families are more likely than those from high-income families to skip college education and get a job after high school graduation, a survey showed Monday.

According to the survey conducted by the Korean Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (KRIET), parents whose children go to college directly after graduating from high school averaged 2.86 million won ($2,622) in monthly income.

Children who skipped or postpone college education had parents whose average income was tallied at 1.6 million won. For those who worked themselves for college education, their parents made 2.07 million won on average.

The report was based on a survey conducted from 2004-2014 on 2,514 students who were high school seniors in 2004.

Last year’s employment rate of students who entered college after graduation in 2005 and those who started working first and entered college later stood at 78.7 and 78.1 percent, respectively, while those who forwent college in 2005 was 75.4 percent.

As for the job security, the ratio of regular workers is the highest among those who went to college right after graduating from high school. More than 84 percent of them had full-time jobs in 2014.

About 81 percent of those who chose “working first and college later” and 79 percent of those who didn’t go to college at all and entered a company right after school were regular workers.

“The results prove that Korean society has failed to prevent the widening income gap between rich and poor families passing down to the next generation,” an institute official said. “The government should increase support for specialized high schools to help more students”

Some high school graduates called for creating high-quality jobs for high school graduates.

“The government needs to ensure that high school graduates are treated well and paid a fair wage at companies,” Kang Nam-koo, a high school graduate who is now CEO of Ingstory, a career education business, told The Korea Times.

“I think it would be better to provide benefits to startup companies to help them hire more high school graduates.”