Students graduating from the nation's universities, two-year junior colleges and high schools next March are not likely to agree with the optimistic pronouncements being made about signs of a long-delayed recovery for Japan's battered economy. Better days may indeed be ahead for the corporate world, as analysts in both the government and the public sector are claiming. If this is true, however, the improvement appears to be coming at least partly at the expense of the prospective graduates, for whom the hiring rate has sunk to an all-time low.

The bleak employment picture for all age groups remains a major social issue, and a source of ever-increasing public anxiety nationwide. For those young people who are being hindered from entering the workforce for the first time by the lack of available jobs, the situation could hardly be worse. The reported figures of 63.6 percent for graduating university and college students and 41.2 percent for those finishing high school who have received even informal employment notices are the lowest ever recorded. The numbers reflect decreases of 3.9 percent and 7.7 percent respectively from last year.

These figures do not come from the educational institutions themselves, many of which acknowledge a growing lack of success in helping prospective graduates find employment. The percentages are the result of an official government survey, undertaken jointly by the ministries of Labor and Education, which began conducting such studies in 1987. The fall in job offers for high school graduates is the greatest since the first of the surveys 12 years ago. With the continuing surge in corporate failures and so many companies, large and small, pursing drastic restructuring policies, no early automatic improvement in the job picture is being predicted.