On June 13, 2019, Professor ZHAN Shengru from Institute of Educational Research from Taiwan Chung Cheng University delivered a lecture entitled “Changing Youth Career Opportunity: A Generational Mobility Perspective” for IICE’s International Education Podium. The lecture was chaired by IICE Professor LIU Baocun and attended by faculty members and graduate students from the IICE.

Prof. ZHAN began his lecture by explaining the trajectory of the massification for higher education in Taiwan based upon human capital theory, and put forward the research question of whether youth career opportunities changed with the massification process. By running logistic regression on the official data provided by the statistics department pertaining to human resource investigations from 1994 to 2014, Prof. ZHAN’s research found that there was in fact significant intergenerational difference in career opportunities, with the younger generation accessing better opportunities. In combination with an analysis of unemployment rate and salary levels, Prof. ZHAN concluded that notwithstanding the increasing job opportunities available to Taiwan youth, the career quality is not always satisfactory due to various factors such as title inflation, intensified human labor cost competition and so on. Finally, Prof. ZHAN discussed with the audience the methodology and data processing involved in his research and the prospects of his projects.

Prof. ZHAN is the President of the Chinese Taipei Comparative Education Society and the director of the Higher Education Evaluation Center of Taiwan Financial Corporation. He is the Editor in Chief of the journal Higher Education in Asia, the deputy chief editor of Asian Education and Development Studies, and a member of the editorial board of Higher Education Research & Development. His main research areas are education management and policy, higher education, comparative education, educational finance and economy.