The government said Tuesday that 96.7 percent of March university graduates were employed as of April 1, the first day of the 2015 business year, up 2.3 percentage points from a year earlier and the fourth straight year of improvement.

The figures were based on a survey by the labor and education ministries covering 62 four-year universities across the country.

An estimated 397,000 graduates have found jobs while 14,000 have failed to do so despite looking for work. The employment rate was the second-highest after the peak in spring 2008, half a year before the global financial crisis broke out.