Job Preference of University Student: A Discrete Choice Experiment

Today employees compete for qualified individuals and try to reduce employee turnover as a profit maximizing condition. That is why a proper understanding of employees' demands, including and beyond wage, is critical. The paper examines how various job attributes affect university students’ utility and their tendencies to choose different types of jobs. This study adopted the Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) to find the Willingness to accept (WTA) among 213 students of Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP). This study identified four essential job attributes such as monthly wage, job security, working hours and the opportunity of using the knowledge or skills they gained during their bachelor’s or masters and quantify the tradeoff preference among these four attributes. The paper finds that students prefer the public job sector more than the private job, entrepreneurship, and higher study. Having job security increases their utility by 35.8 percent and they require an amount of 16 thousand taka in the absence of job security. Working for long hours such as 46-60 hours and 61-75 hours decreases their utility by 39 percent and 25.2 percent respectively. Moreover, Female students are required more compensation than males for longer working hours whereas male students put more value on high wages.