At the end of November, an all-time low of 60.3 percent of high school students had been promised jobs after graduation, surpassing the previous record low of 63.4 percent registered a year earlier.

Some 80,000 students, or two out of five, have been unable to get a promise of a job after graduation, a survey by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry found.

The level was up from 47.1 percent in an education ministry survey at the end of October.

The ratio of job openings to applications was down to 0.9, falling from 0.98 in the previous year, according to the labor ministry's survey.

Under a supplementary budget that is expected to clear the Diet later this month, the ministry will set up a system under which 100 "job supporters" dispatched by the government will help job seekers find employment, officials said.

Under the system, which is expected to start at the end of January, the job supporters will help draw up job introduction plans for students, advise them about companies and conduct practice job interviews with the students. The ministry will also hold job-interview work shops in 32 prefectures by the end of March, when the school year ends.

There are about 200,000 high school students looking for jobs, down 6.7 percent from the same period in the previous year, while job offers are down 14.1 percent from the year before to around 181,000.

High school students nationwide have had fewer job promises, the survey found. Only in the Tokai and Hokuriku regions did more than 70 percent have job promises, whereas only 39.3 percent did in Hokkaido, 48 percent in the Tohoku region and 49.6 percent in southern Kyushu.