Among the 34 EU member states, Greece has the highest rate of unemployed people aged 15-29 with a college or university degree. According to the Paris-based agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 40% of educated Greek youth remain unemployed.
The report, titled “Education at a Glance,” found that Greece continues to have some of the highest unemployment rates for people from all levels of educational attainment, while the percentage of jobless 25-to-64 year-olds with below-upper secondary education skyrocketed from 12% in 2010 to 28 percent in 2014, compared with the OECD average of 13%.
Greece also has an unemployment rate of 28% among those aged 25-64 with upper secondary but not tertiary education, compared to the average of 8% in the rest of Europe. The rate in 2014 stood at 19% against the OECD average of 5%. In both indexes, Greece had the highest rate in the OECD.
The report moreover found that even though more Greeks are attaining higher education qualifications, the rate is below average. In 2014, 28% of adults in the 25-64 age group had received tertiary diplomas from 25% in 2010, but this is still below the OECD average of 34 and 32% respectively. In the 25-34 age group, 39% of Greeks had tertiary qualifications in 2014 compared with 31% in 2010, which was closer to the respective OECD averages of 41 and 38%.
Another find in the study is that while more Greek women attain higher levels of education than men, employment rates and salaries continue to lag behind the male population. In 2014, 21% of women with tertiary qualifications were unemployed compared to 14% of men in the same category. In 2013, they also earned 77% of what their male counterparts were making in the 35-44 age group and just 54% in the 55-64 group.
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