Determinants of Starting Salaries for Filipino Graduates: An Explainable Machine Learning Approach

Filipino graduates face a persistent disconnect between educational preparation and labor market outcomes, where starting salary is a key signal of entry-level valuation. Current Philippine research is dominated by descriptive tracer studies that document employment rates but do not explain the determinants of pay. We address this gap using a crowd-sourced survey dataset of graduate responses whose noisy, self-reported nature makes it a challenging prediction target. Applying machine learning to this problem, we identify job role and industry as the dominant determinants of starting salary, significantly outweighing institutional prestige. The strength of this finding is its central contribution: it is corroborated by three independent lines of evidence, namely SHAP attributions, the heavy reliance of the best ensemble on occupational text, and a Natural Language Inference reformulation. These results suggest that career guidance and policy should prioritize sector-specific skills over institutional brand.

An Integrated System for Real-Time Student Assessment and Career Guidance Using Neural Networks in Computing Disciplines

Many undergraduate students in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SWE) struggle to identify suitable career paths, particularly when their academic performance, abilities, and interests do not fully align. To address this issue, this study proposes an AI-driven Student Assessment and Career Prediction System that integrates a Career Guidance Expert (CGE) system with a Web-Based Student Assessment (WBSA) platform. Within the integrated framework, CGE enhances personalized career recommendations using AI while also assisting students after graduation in identifying suitable jobs, research domains, and higher study opportunities aligned with their skills and interests. The WBSA platform further strengthens interaction between students and faculty through assessments, personalized tasks, mentorship activities, and a secure real-time chat application. The CGE system employs a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model trained on real-world academic and extracurricular data collected using the snowball sampling method from the students of universities, achieving a validation accuracy of 94.71% in predicting personalized career paths. A pre-survey was conducted across universities to evaluate the proposed model before deployment. The WBSA system was developed as a modern web application using technologies such as Node.js, Next.js, and PostgreSQL to ensure scalability, responsiveness, and secure data management. The overall system is supported by a secure cloud-based infrastructure, the platform provides reliable performance while assisting graduates to select suitable career path in IT sector. In addition, a post-survey involving both students and faculty was conducted to gather feedback and further improve the overall effectiveness and usability of the system.