Malta stood above the EU average in 2018 when it came to the employment rate of graduates aged 20-34 who had attained a tertiary level education within the previous three years, and actually had the highest percentage rate out of all EU countries, Eurostat figures show.

In Malta, 96.7% of all graduates aged 20-34 who had attained a tertiary level education within the previous three years were employed. The EU average stood at 85.5%.

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.

In terms of the EU average, this 2018 statistic is 0.6 percentage points above the rate in 2017 and 1.4 percentage points below the previous high point of 86.9% in 2008.

The EU Member States with the highest employment rates for recent tertiary graduates in 2018 were Malta (96.7%), the Netherlands (94.8%), Germany (94.3%) and Luxembourg (94%). In contrast, there were four EU Member States where the rate was less than 80%: Spain (77.9%), Croatia (75.2%), Italy (62.8%) and Greece (59%).

In terms of all 20-34 olds, 16.5 % of them in the EU in 2018 were neither in employment nor in education and training. Malta had the fourth lowest percentage in this regard, standing at 10.1%.This meant that the 89.9% of Maltese aged 20-34 were either in education or employment.

In terms of 18-24 year olds, Malta has a high rate of early leavers from education and training. In 2018, an average of 10.6 % of young people (aged 18-24) in the EU were early leavers from education and training, in other words, they had completed at most a lower secondary education and were not in further education or training during the four weeks preceding the survey. In this article, the terms ‘early leavers’ and ‘early leavers from education and training’ are used interchangeably. Malta stood way above the EU average in this regard with 17.5%, the second highest percentage. The only country with a higher percentage is Spain.