BAKGRUNN (fra kommisjonsforslaget, engelsk utgave)

Reasons for and objectives of the proposal

The objective of the proposed Council Recommendation is to improve the availability of qualitative and quantitative information about what graduates from tertiary education and vocational education and training (VET) in Europe do after they complete their education and training. Such information can be used by services that help new students make informed choices about what to study, by teaching staff and institutional management as input for the design of courses and by government authorities to inform decisions about how to steer higher education and VET systems. The proposal aims to stimulate further development and exploitation of different forms of graduate tracking mechanisms at education system level in individual Member States and to encourage greater cooperation between national actors involved in tracking to share good practice and, ultimately, increase the comparability of tracking data collected.

The employability of graduates is of concern in many EU Member States. In some parts of the EU, a significant share of tertiary graduates are unemployed or working in jobs for which they are overqualified. For recent graduates from VET programmes, the picture is more complex. In some countries, such as Denmark, Estonia and Germany, recent VET graduates have high employment rates that even exceed those for tertiary graduates. However, in many other countries, including France, Spain and Italy, the equivalent employment rates for VET graduates are notably lower and lag well behind tertiary graduates.

Good quality information about what graduates go on to do after leaving education and training, and on how they assess the knowledge, skills and competences they gained in school, college or university, is essential to understanding both the causes of graduate employability problems and the success factors in particular regions, economic sectors or for graduates from particular higher education and VET disciplines. This information can then be used to identify solutions.

This proposal for a Council Recommendation and the proposed EU-level initiatives that accompany it will respond to three main problems in Europe:

• A lack of fine-grained information. Basic information on graduate employment and social outcomes is available, including at EU level, from existing data collection exercises, such as the European Labour Force Survey . Moreover, some Member States have developed graduate surveys or set up additional systems to analyse data from education, tax and social security databases and register systems (administrative data) to track graduates' subsequent careers and earnings. However, in many parts of the EU, systems for collecting, analysing and using data on the graduate outcomes from tertiary education and VET are not well developed. The result is that solid evidence is often not available.

• Missed synergies. Although many EU Member States are developing systems for tracking at the moment, or have plans to do so, there is currently limited exchange of knowledge about good practice and mutual learning about what works.

• A lack of comparable data. Existing comparable data are limited in scope and data collected nationally are not comparable between countries, making it hard to draw lessons from differences in trends and observed outcomes across countries and regions.

To address these issues, the proposed Council Recommendation and related EU-level initiatives have the following specific objectives:

• To encourage the start or further development and improvement of graduate tracking systems for tertiary education and VET at national level in Europe. In order to build a fuller picture of the outcomes of tertiary education and VET, Member States are encouraged to include within their tracking systems people who leave education and training without graduating.

• To encourage and facilitate greater cooperation and sharing of good practice between national actors involved in graduate tracking on implementing graduate surveys and tracking systems using administrative data, and exploiting their results through networking, mutual learning and counselling activities at EU level.

• To improve the availability of comparable information on graduate employment and social outcomes. This objective will be pursued through the cooperation activities highlighted above, in which improving comparability will be one of the aspects taken into account in further developing national tracking systems. In addition, this year the Commission will launch a pilot phase of a European graduate survey to test the feasibility of collecting information on tertiary graduate outcomes, building on the results of the Eurograduate Feasibility Study , and continue efforts to harmonise social survey questions.