European Trade Union Committee for Education

In its meeting on 23-24 October, the ETUCE Committee adopted the ETUCE position on the European Commission’s proposal for a Council Recommendation on Tracking Graduates. The proposal suggests that each Member State should collect the same data about graduates, early drop-out and persons not in education, employment, or training (NEET) to  identify solutions regarding youth unemployment and to provide feedback to vocational education and higher education institutions.

ETUCE insists that graduates’ achievements need to be analysed and used with great sensitivity as employers’ organisations tend to blame the education sector for the so-called  ‘skills mismatch’.

On the contrary, data about the graduates should be considered together with companies’ job offers for graduates, salary and quality working conditions, recruitment procedures and employers’ responsibility to invest in continuous upskilling of employees, as these factors narrow the labour market perspectives for graduates.

Moreover, ETUCE underlines that graduate tracking should not be used to evaluate individual institutions with a view to linking employability rates to performance-based funding of schools and universities.

Read the Position

European Commission’s proposal for a Council Recommendation on Tracking Graduates