Japan’s record graduate employment rate highlights the need for more support for international students to stay and work in the country as businesses increasingly compete for a shrinking pool of skilled workers, according to academics.
New figures from the country’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare show that, of those seeking jobs, 98 per cent of 2025-26 university leavers were employed on 1 April, having graduated in March.
The graduate employment rate was unchanged from last year – the highest level since records began in 1997.
Although the figures partially reflect an ongoing practice of cohort-based hiring, which means Japanese firms recruit graduates with the expectation they will remain at the company long-term, they also highlight “a deeper structural issue linked to demographic decline”, according to Futao Huang, professor at Hiroshima University’s Research Institute for Higher Education.
“Japan’s shrinking youth population means that employers are competing for a steadily smaller pool of university graduates,” he said. “In this sense, the exceptionally high graduate employment rate partly reflects the opposite problem from that faced in many Western countries: rather than graduate oversupply, Japan is increasingly confronting a shortage of highly educated young workers.”
