Challenging the sustainability of an education system of evaluation and labor market outcomes

Students' inattention to the importance of teaching evaluations may undermine the sustainability of the education evaluation system. This study analyzed the effects of the personality variable reflected by monotonic response patterns, which is a typical example of student indifference, on the employability of graduates using Career-SET (student evaluations of teaching) matched data of college graduates from 2008-2012. The results from various estimation models consistently indicated that graduates with a higher ratio of insincere responses in student evaluations of teaching are less likely to be employed, or are hired for lower prestige jobs than other comparison groups. This means that unlike the current practice in which firms rely simply on specifications to hire employees, applicants' invisible characteristics, such as personality, can also be screened by job interviewers.