Many Seoul Nat’l Univ. Grads Diversifying Career Choices

Many graduates of Seoul National University, Korea’s top institution of higher learning, have sought careers other than academia over the past 28 years.

In the early 1980s, 40 percent of the graduates became professors, but only 10 percent were in the 1990s.

The university yesterday released the results of an analysis on the occupations of 38,028 alumni by time period and major.

The number of professors and researchers among alumni has decreased, while that of certificate holders has gone the other way.

For 28 years, the largest proportion (6,480 persons or 17 percent) of graduates pursued professorship, but this choice has rapidly declined over time.

For the years 1980-84, 3,214 of the university’s graduates (36.2 percent) got jobs as college professors. That figure steadily dropped to 2,156 (23.7 percent) for those who graduated in 1985-89; 878 (11.3 percent) for those who graduated in 1990-94; and 208 (3.1 percent) for those who graduated in 1995-99.

Even after considering graduates in the late 1990s who are still preparing to become professors, the decline is still huge.

The number of graduates working in research for business or national think tanks has also gone down, from 2,167 (7.1 percent) of those who graduated in 1980-84 to 483 (6.2 percent) of those who graduated in 1990-94, and further to 119 (3.8 percent) of those graduated in 2000-04.

Much higher, however, is the number of graduates who have obtained professional certificates. The number of those getting jobs as accountants or patent attorneys rose from 72 (0.8 percent) of those who graduated in 1980-84 to 161 (2.4 percent) of those who graduated in 1995-99 and further to 122 (3.92 percent) of those who graduated in 2000-04.

Han Sang-geun, director of the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, said, “The pool of professors is saturated and the shifting focus on finding a lifelong vocation instead of a lifelong employer in the 2000s has spread to Seoul National University as well.”

“That’s why more and more of its graduates are drawn to professional certificates.”

Most graduates of Korea’s top university who joined a conglomerate went to work for the Samsung Group. Over the 28-year period, about 1,270 or 30.2 percent of the school’s 4,203 graduates who entered one of Korea’s top 30 conglomerates went to Samsung.

LG was second (546 or 13 percent); SK third (445 or 10.6 percent); and Hyundai-Kia fourth (253 or six percent).

Samsung Electronics alone employed 480 of the school’s graduates over the 28 years, more than the combined figure for SK in the same period.

The number of the university’s graduates who joined a conglomerate peaked in the late 1990s, but has since declined.

By contrast, more graduates are taking state examinations and working in the public sector, including the prosecution, courts and government agencies. For the first time in the school’s history, graduates who graduated in 2000-04 who worked for the government outnumbered those who joined a conglomerate, 373-332.

The university’s College of Natural Science produced the highest proportion of professors from its graduates. For instance, 47.4 percent of those who majored in statistics became professors, the highest of any department.

All departments in the college made the top 10 list in producing professors, including physics and astronomy (41.7 percent); chemistry (38.3 percent), bioscience (35.4 percent); and mathematics (34.8 percent).

Ninety percent of those who majored in law, medicine and nursing landed jobs in their respective fields. More than half of graduates from the departments of communications, landscape architecture and rural system engineering were also working in related sectors.