Page 14 - IDEA Study 10 2015 Skills Mismatches

3. Educational structure of graduates by field of education This section illustrates the education structure of graduates by their main field of study. It also illustrates how the field of study is related to youth unemployment rates and which fields of education pose the highest risk of becoming unemployed. Table 1 reports fields of study for secondary and tertiary educated graduates (fields that represent less than 1% of young cohorts of graduates are not reported here). Among secondary educated young individuals, the most represented fields of study are engineering and metallurgy (15% of all young secondary educated individuals), architecture and construction (10%), wholesale and retail (8%), hospitality and restaurant services (8%), textiles production (8%), electrotechnics and energetics (7%), and motor vehicle engineering (6%). The educational structure of secondary educated thus corresponds to a large extend to the heavily industrialized Czech economy which is mostly focused on engineering, mining, energy, chemistry, and food production. Tertiary educated graduates have slightly different structure of the main fields of study. The most represented fields of study are pedagogy (16% of all young tertiary educated individuals), economics (14%), and medicine (8%). However, right below these three main fields, we can see that tertiary education is also highly concentrated on technical fields, such as engineering and metallurgy (6%) and architecture and construction (5%).8 While overall youth unemployment rates of both secondary and tertiary educated individuals are very low in the Czech Republic, there are important differences in the risk of becoming unemployed across fields of study. Figure 4 illustrates average youth unemployment rates for secondary educated individuals by their field of education in years 2003-2014. The largest risk of unemployment is among graduates of textiles production (youth unemployment rate of 13.3%), wholesale and retail (11.1%), hospitality and restaurant services (8.9%), and food production (8.6%). The lowest unemployment rates are on the other hand among graduates of medicine, technical fields, economics and pedagogy (unemployment rates below 5%). 8 Educational structure presented here includes graduates of both public and private universities. Private universities offer study programs mainly in economics, humanities and pedagogy, and they account for quite substantial share of graduates nowadays (in 2010, students of private universities accounted for 14% of all university students, source: Annual Report on Operation of University Education in the Czech Republic: http://www.msmt.cz/vzdelavani/vysoke-skolstvi/vyrocni-zpravy-o-cinnosti-vysokych-skol). 10