In difficult economic times, it sometimes seems that even a degree is not enough to land a job. Actually, there are still certain degree courses that guarantee excellent chances of entering into a reliable position in the world of work. Inter-university consortium Alma Laurea was founded in 1994 and gathers statistics on universities. It has been monitoring the success of the various university courses each year.
The latest available data concerns those who graduated in 2011 and shows that medicine graduates have the highest chance of landing a job within five years of graduating, with a 93.9% graduate employment rate.
Engineering brings in only slightly lower numbers, at 93.6%. Of its various branches – civil, mechanical, aerospace, etc. – the best is IT engineering, with an employment rate of 95.7%. It also comes with one of the highest average monthly salaries (1626 euros).
For those hoping to find work, the average for engineering exceeds the third best discipline by 4%. That discipline is economics, on 89.3%, an incredible result in this ranking because it beats biology, on 88.4%, and pharmaceutical chemistry in fifth place, on 85.8%.
The latest available data shows that medicine graduates have the highest chance of landing a job.
In general – and perhaps unsurprisingly – scientific programmes of study have better prospects than the humanities. In fact, if the average employment rate for graduates within five years of leaving university is 84%, it means things are not going so well in certain disciplines. For psychology, for example, fewer than 79% of graduates found work. Perhaps even more concerning is their average monthly pay of less than 900 euros per month.
Studying law is even worse: despite the huge amount of work required to graduate in this degree, internships and state examinations make it a very complicated system for young people, resulting in a graduate employment rate no higher than 76%. At the tail end, with the lowest graduate employment rate, is literature.