Proposal for a Council Recommendation on tracking graduates

The employability of graduates is of concern in many EU Member States. In some parts of the EU, a significant share of tertiary graduates are unemployed or working in jobs for which they are overqualified. For recent graduates from vocational education and training (VET) programmes, the picture is more complex. In some countries, such as Denmark, Estonia and Germany, recent VET graduates have high employment rates that even exceed those for tertiary graduates. However, in many other countries, including France, Spain and Italy, the equivalent employment rates for VET graduates are notably lower and lag well behind tertiary graduates.

Good quality information about what graduates go on to do after leaving education and training, and on how they assess the knowledge, skills and competences they gained in school, college or university, is essential to understanding both the causes of graduate employability problems and the success factors in particular regions, economic sectors or for graduates from particular higher education and VET disciplines. This information can then be used to identify solutions.

The objective of the proposed Council Recommendation is to improve the availability of qualitative and quantitative information about what graduates from tertiary education and VET in Europe do after they complete their education and training. Such information can be used by services that help new students make informed choices about what to study, by teaching staff and institutional management as input for the design of courses and by government authorities to inform decisions about how to steer higher education and VET systems.

The proposal aims to stimulate further development and exploitation of different forms of graduate tracking mechanisms at education system level in individual Member States and to encourage greater cooperation between national actors involved in tracking to share good practice and, ultimately, increase the comparability of tracking data collected.

EUR-Lex: COM(2017)249: Follow the progress of this proposal through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2017:249:FIN

ESO: Background information: Youth initiative: Commission sets out strategy for high quality, inclusive, future-oriented education http://www.europeansources.info/record/youth-initiative-commission-sets-out-strategy-for-high-quality-inclusive-future-oriented-education/

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