Skills and jobs mismatch – update

Following on Amy´s post on graduate unemployment this morning and my blog post yesterday about highly skilled graduates finding themselves in low skilled jobs, here´s a report from adamsmith.org which argues that “there is an oversupply of graduates” which has “created mass unemployment for graduates.”

It goes on to say that “if some of the now-unemployed graduates had spent the last four years in the workforce, developing skills that were needed by employers, far fewer would be in their situation.”

Supply-side policies are those which increase the quantity and/or quality of the factors of production so if we improve the skills of our workforce by sending more school-leavers to university, in theory we should increase the long run productive potential of our economy. Instead we have a situation where one in eleven graduates are unemployed. It seems that we may be saddling some of our young graduates with skills no one needs and lots of debt. My A level pupils have discussed this view as a possible evaluative point for supply side policies.

Here´s another related article: Graduate unemployment at highest level for 17 years