The Impact on Employment of Science Learning in High School: Evidence from income data of university graduates in employment (Japanese)

In this paper, we examined the impact of changes in the content of science learning on the formation of personal capacity and on the competitiveness of workers in the labor market, by analyzing data on the incomes of university graduates. In order to analyze the impact of changes in the Guidelines for the curriculum, we divided the samples into three groups according to the curriculum applied to their high school education (pre-Yutori Education generation, Yutori Education generation, New Outlook on Academic Achievement generation). Our analysis showed that the younger the sampled subject, or, to put it another way, the lesser the emphasis on subject-based learning, the greater the negative effect on learning in the science subjects, manifesting itself in a tendency for students to adopt an unfavorable view of science subjects. Moreover, our results also showed that, in every generation, physics learning contributed to an increase in income, and further implied that physics learning was also a significant factor in the formation of earning capacity.