How Socio-Edupreneurship can Moderate the Impact of Academia–Industry Gaps, Social Pressure, and Training Deficits on the Employment Challenges of Social Science Graduates

Abstract

The growing gap between educational preparation and the demands of the labor market has exacerbated the job search difficulties of social science graduates. The research was focused on investigating the potential of socio-edupreneurship to reduce the effects of academia-industry mismatch, social stigma and training shortage on graduate employability via its two dimensions of self-efficacy and social capital. There were 312 master students at Hyderabad and Jamshoro enrolled in public and private universities who were used to gather the data. An organized questionnaire was used and data were processed by Structural Equation Modeling with Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) in Smart-PLS. The findings showed that academia-industry gap has a high impact on employment issues, both directly and indirectly, by putting a pressurizing social pressure and training shortage. Socio-edupreneurship turned out to have a close negative impact on employment issues and moderate the influence of academia-industry gaps and social pressure, thus lessening their negative influence. Moreover, self-efficacy and social capital were identified to increase the total impact of socio-edupreneurship with social capital having a sizeable direct impact as well. The implications of the findings include implications to universities, policymakers, and students, whereby, curriculum reform, more focused partnerships with the industry, and institutionalization of socio-edupreneurial programs will enable sustainable graduate employability.