The Effect of Dropout from Tertiary Education on Status Attainment in Japan

The purpose of this study is to describe how different the status attainment is between tertiary education graduates and dropouts. Dropouts are said they tend to become unemployed or non-regular worker in Japan. In other words, dropping out may cause falling into lower status. While entering tertiary education becomes common in Japan and the number of dropouts is unignorable, very few studies focus on dropouts’ status attainment. First, we focus on intra-generational mobility. We merge several national survey datasets and obtain the mobility table. The result of comparing some log-linear or log-multiplicative models shows tertiary education dropouts have higher risk of downward mobility and smaller chance of upward mobility than both high school graduates and tertiary education graduates. Secondly, we focus on the detail of career path. According to the result of event history analysis, there are 3 features of dropouts’ career path; (1) dropouts gets the first job later than both high school graduates and tertiary graduates , (2) dropouts quit the first job faster, and (3) dropouts are promoted later than others (more precisely results will be shown at the presentation). Considering these results, dropping out from tertiary education should cause lower status attainment than both high school graduates and tertiary education graduates. This fact suggests that Japanese traditional school to work transition system and the development of internal labor market ignore people who dropped out. These system are wasting labor force in contradiction to the aim, effective assignment of them. However, this Japanese particular transition system can also be interpreted as the function of preventing dropping out. To avoid the exclusion from this system, students may manage to graduate the school and that results in the lowest dropout rate in the world.