Graduate Employment as a Measure of Higher Education Performance: The Case of Romania

Graduate employment can be a tough process in an ever-changing labor market. Universities must constantly cooperate with the industry and adapt curricula to match the required skills and competences. This paper’s objective is to compare Romanian tertiary graduate employment with EU indicators. The analysis, a mix between quantitative and descriptive, is composed of trend and gap analyses, simple regressions, and structural analysis based on the data found on Eurostat, highlighting differences between Romania’s performance in integrating young people (20-34 years old) on the labor market and the EU average. Results reveal that higher educational attainment does not automatically mean better labor market outcomes and that the NEET rates explain most of the variation in Romania’s graduate employment performance over the observed period of 2015-2024. Future potential research could include a more thorough approach on comparing Romania with specific European countries, rather than taking into account only averages.