I can't speak for any other country, obviously culture plays a role, but in Germany we just had an article in one of the top two news sites (and this is the much more reputable one of the two) [0] that says in a poll [1] 1/3rd of students said they'd like to become a "Beamter", which is a special status for life-term government employees who cannot be fired and have their own pension scheme.
Job security was the number one concern overall (63% of said so). Income was only in fifth place. There was a big difference between the sexes, the share of women who wanted to work for the government was much higher (42% vs. 23% of men).
But that's not all - most students prefer to work for very large companies, giants like Siemens, BMW etc. regularly top the ranking of places where students want to go to. Few want to go to small and medium companies, even though we have a lot of them. Even fewer want to work for a startup or even found one.
I am certainly not critical of that attitude, I doubt that throughout history there ever was a big part of humanity that preferred insecurity and excitement and (often dubious) "chances" that actually depend on quite a bit of luck quite heavily over friends, family and a solid secure basis. That is if that was available of course, often people were forced into being more adventurous by circumstances.
[0] (in German) http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/berufsstart/jeder-dritte-stud...
[1] (PDF) http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-Studentenstudie-...