Date of Award

2001

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Program

Higher Education Administration EdD

First Advisor

Edward A. Streeter

Second Advisor

Hinsdale Bernard

Third Advisor

Newton W. Hoilette

Abstract

Problem. Colleges have established offices of career planning and placement services to advise students who are making decisions concerning their vocational goals and to help graduates secure employment in their field of study. However, despite good intentions and efforts put together by colleges in establishing such offices, one problem still exists and needs to be addressed: It appears that the impact of career planning and placement services is not clearly understood by all potential graduates. There is a need for research to investigate how students perceive services provided by this office.

Method. The study acquired the perceptions of 255 graduates regarding the impact of placement services. Data were organized and coded into various categories and related to the different classifications of the respondents. By this method the researcher was able to see how different categories of the graduates responded to different questions. The responses given by the graduates for each item on the Likert-type scale provided an indication of the degree to which the respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement. The data collected in this study were analyzed using Analysis of Variance (one-way classification). This method analyzed the effect of gender, college major, job position, annual salary, and how respondents secured employment in the perceived impact of placement services.

Results. There were significant differences between gender, college major, job position, annual salary, and how the job was found regarding the perceived impact of placement services. All factors were tested at .05 level of significance; p was below .05 with all factors tested.

Conclusion. More females (45%) than males (36%) were very satisfied with placement services. Job satisfaction was ranked higher (70%) than any other item. Five other items had scores between 60% and 67%, suggesting that graduates were satisfied by placement services. The item asking if the resume services offered by the placement office were of great value ranked between 40% and 49%, suggesting that graduates needed more assistance with resume preparation. Placement-office personnel need to provide more resume preparation than they previously offered.

Subject Area

Vocational guidance, Career education, College graduates--Employment, Andrews University--Dissertations--Vocational guidance.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dissertations/606/

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