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