The Relationship between Cooperative Education Performance Evaluation and Employment Status of Accounting Graduates in Three-Semester Cooperation Education Curriculum

Abstract

       The purpose of this study is to: 1) study characteristics of students after completing cooperative education, 2) their employment status before and after graduation, and 3) the relationship between characteristics of students after completing cooperation education and employment status before and after their graduation. The samples for data collection were 35 accounting graduates who graduated in 2015 (BE 2558) from the curriculum that sets three times of cooperation education in three semesters from Walailak University by using a cooperative evaluation form and questionnaire for graduates. The statistics for analyzing the data were frequency, percentage, mean, and Chi-square.

        The results indicated that 1) the characteristics of the majority of the students were very good and excellent with the highest score for personal characteristics and the lowest score (but still in the fair range) for language skills; 2) most graduates could get a job before graduation (62.86%) and within three months after graduation (14.29%), altogether 77.14%, which is considered very high; and 3) the relationship between characteristics of students after completing cooperation education and employment status before and after their graduation was consistent in that most of the evaluation score from the first cooperative education except workload did not correspond to employment whereas that from the second and third cooperative education was more correlated with employment. The characteristic which mostly led to employment both before and after graduation was knowledge and competency.