A study conducted by JobStreet.com about a year ago revealed that of their 100,000-plus members in Malaysia who hold a Bachelor degree and are currently working in the country, graduates from overseas universities on average earn about 12 percent more than local graduates.
The salary gap is most apparent among those with up to five years of work experience where overseas graduates are earning a significant 20 percent more than their local counterparts. Even after 10 years or more of work experience, the gap is still more than 10 percent.
In terms of job specialization, the biggest salary gap between overseas and local graduates is in business-related fields such as management, economics, finance and marketing where overseas graduates earn about 15 percent more than local graduates.
In the engineering and IT/Computer fields, salaries are about 11 percent higher for overseas graduates.
JobStreet.com also did a similar study among 20,000 members in Singapore and observed that there is no significant difference between the salaries of graduates from local Singaporean universities and overseas universities even after five or 10 years of work experience.
In conclusion, a Malaysian who graduates from a local Malaysian university earns on average a lower salary than those who graduate from an overseas university. There were no significant difference in salaries that exists among graduates in Singapore.
Note: For this research, the term “overseas” refers to the top three most popular overseas destinations for tertiary studies – Australia, Great Britain and United States – and includes twinning programmes.
(This article of mine originally appeared in BlogStreet.)