Finland is not only a good country to come to study, but also a suitable place to later stay and find a job according to the acquired training.
The Finnish Government is currently drawing a new strategy to attract talented students from all over the world. At stake is Finland's ability to maintain its capacity to gain the best brains for its innovative and highly digitized economy. And for that purpose, there is no better asset than a business structure capable of responding to the challenge of creating the trades of the future.
The latest comparison made in Brussels by the statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat) leaves Finland in a good position with respect to its European partners in terms of employment among the most educated of society.
The figures for 2018 show that 88.3% of Finnish graduates aged 20 to 34 years, who had attained a tertiary level education in the previous three years, were employed.
Finland's employment rate for university graduates is actually higher than the average rate for the entire European Union (85.5%). The EU's result is 0.6 percentage points above the rate achieved in the year before, but still 1.4 points below the previous high point of 86.9% reached in 2008, before the financial crisis.
Once again, Finland is not among the best, but well above the average.
Image source: Eurostat
The handicap of gender difference
But being better than average, does not cover the fact that there is much work to be done in order to improve.
Apart from the fact that there are still almost 12% of unemployed young graduates, the results obtained by Finland reveal another worrisome reality: the notable difference in terms of gender among highly educated people. The employment rate shoots up to almost 97% among men, while for women it remains at 83.4%.
These gender differences are not as pronounced among all the EU. The average employment rate among high educated young men for all the 28 Member States is 87.2% and that of women is 84%.
Malta and The Netherlands top the ranking
According to Eurostat, the EU Member States with the highest employment rates for recent tertiary graduates in 2018 were Malta (96.7%), Netherlands (94.8%), Germany (94.3%) and Luxembourg (94%). In addition, in those four countries the gender differences are practically non-existing.
In contrast, there were four countries where the rate was less than 80%: Spain (77.9%), Croatia (75.2%), Italy (62.8%) and Greece (59%).
The statistical office of the European Union also remarks that young people with a tertiary level of educational attainment recorded the highest employment rates and were generally better shielded from the risks of unemployment than their peers who entered the labour market with lower levels of educational attainment.
