Eurostat: Italy, Greece and Romania have the most unemployed among recent graduates in the EU

The share of recent high school or college graduates from the EU who were employed reached 83.5% in 2023, up by 1.1 percentage points compared to 82.4% in 2022, but Romania is among the member countries with the most unemployed among recent graduates from the EU, according to the data published on Wednesday by Eurostat.   Recent graduates are people aged between 20 and 34, who have completed their secondary or tertiary studies in the last three years. According to Eurostat, the employment rate among recent graduates is higher than 80% in 22 EU member countries.   The best in this chapter is Malta, where 95.8% of recent graduates were employed in 2023, followed by the Netherlands (93.2%) and Germany (91.5%).   At the opposite pole, the lowest employment rates among recent graduates were recorded in Italy (67.5%), Greece (72.3%) and Romania (74.8%).   The employment rate is higher among college graduates than among those who have completed high school. In 2023, the employment rate of recent university graduates was above 90% in Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Malta and Estonia. In only two EU member countries this indicator was lower than 80%: Greece and Italy.   By gender, the employment rate among recent EU graduates is higher among men (85%) than among women (82%). This situation is found in 18 member states, including Romania. However, the biggest difference is in the Czech Republic, where the employment rate of men who have recently graduated from high school or college is 19.4 percentage points higher than among women. Conversely, in nine Member States, the employment rate among recent graduates is higher among women than among men. The biggest difference is in Bulgaria, where the employment rate of women who have recently graduated from high school or college is 6 percentage points higher than among men.   At the EU level, in the last ten years there has been an increase in the employment rate among recent graduates. In 2013, this rate stood at 74.3% and in the meantime it has steadily increased. The exception was in 2020, affected by the pandemic, when the share of recent high school or college graduates from the EU decreased by 2.3 percentage points, compared to 2019, to 78.7%.