25. How many recent graduates are employed?

By 2020, the EU aimed to achieve an employment rate for young recent graduates of at least 82% (Council of the European Union, 2012). 

The indicator is defined as the employment rate for the young population (aged 20 to 34) who graduated one, two and three years before the reference year, obtaining qualifications at ISCED 3-8 and who are not currently enrolled in any further education or training activity. 

Employment rate of recent graduates (%)

Source: Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS).

Key points

In 2020, in the EU, the employment rate for young recent graduates was 78.8%, 3.2 percentage points below its target of 82%. Malta (92.2%) had the highest rate, followed by Germany (90.5%) and the Netherlands (89.3%). Greece (54.9%) and Italy (56.8%) had the lowest rates in 2018. Except for these two and Spain (69.6%), employment rates were higher than 70% in all Member States. 

Between 2015 and 2020, and despite a drop by over two points in the last year of the period under observation, the employment rate for young recent graduates in the EU grew by 3.2 percentage points. Growth occurred in many countries for which data can be compared and was highest in Croatia (+12.3%), Slovenia (+11.3%), Greece and Cyprus (+9.7% both), Romania (+8.6%) and Italy (+8.3%). Major falls between 2015 and 2020 are noticeable in Lithuania (-7.6%) and Luxembourg (-4.2%). Due to breaks in time series, 2020 data for Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Poland and Sweden cannot be reliably compared to those for 2015.  

Among the non-EU countries, in 2020, Turkey (53.0%), Montenegro (54.1%), North Macedonia (54.5%) and Serbia (62.3%%) had values below the EU average. By contrast, values for Norway (89.7%), Switzerland (88.9%) and Iceland (88.0%) were higher than the EU average. 

Table 25. Employment rate of recent graduates (%)

Source: Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS). Notes: (b) ‘break in time series’; (p) ‘provisional’; data are not presented when they are not available and/or do not support sufficiently reliable comparisons across countries or over time.