As Novac/Kristina Turcin writes on the 21st of September, 2019, one in sixteen university graduates in the Republic of Croatia is unemployed, which is the third highest share of unemployed people with a college degree in the entire European Union.
According to Eurostat, the share of unemployed highly educated persons in Croatia stands at 5.7 percent, while the European Union average is 3.9 percent. In addition to that, Croatia is the country with one of the lowest proportions of people between the ages of 25 and 64 who have graduated from college: one third in the EU (32.3 percent) and barely a quarter (25.4 percent) in Croatia.
In other words, there are relatively few graduates in Croatia when the bigger picture is taken into consideration, but a relatively high proportion of them, nevertheless, cannot find a job regardless of their qualifications.
The explanation for such indicators lies in the generally high rate of unemployed young people (regardless of their respective educational structure) in the countries with the highest share of unemployed graduates, and it is precisely among young people that the highest share of the highly educated is found.
The top rankings of the countries with the highest youth unemployment rates are essentially the same as those of the countries with the highest youth unemployment rates: Greece, Spain, Italy, and Croatia.
In Greece, according to Eurostat, every eighth person with a university degree is unemployed. At the same time, nearly forty percent of all young people are unemployed in that country, which is two and a half times higher than the EU average. In Spain, the youth unemployment rate stands at 34 percent, and the rate of those unemployed with a degree stands at 8.4 percent.
The above two countries are then followed by Italy and Croatia, and differ from Greece and Spain in that they have a relatively lower proportion of people who have had a higher education: in Greece and Spain, this proportion is higher than the European average, while in Croatia and Italy it is seriously below it.
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