Background
No jobs for highly qualified
Over 71 thousand people under the age of 26 are out of work. Nearly eight thousand of those young people have graduated from a HBO (higher education) or university course. The figures have doubled since this time last year.
Sebastiaan van Loosbroek
Wednesday 13 March 2013

This has emerged from figures published by the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV). Its spokesman Wessel Agterhof explains: "Besides the obvious reason, the economic crisis, these students stayed longer in education too and now they have graduated, they are all looking for jobs."

The rise in highly educated unemployed is the steepest in the sector for economic, administrative and commercial work, though there are increasingly more unemployed among the highly qualified in the social-cultural sector too, according to Agterhof.

The chairman of CNV-Jongeren - the youth division of the Federation of Christian Trade Unions -, IJmert Muilwijk, expects that the unemployment figure for highly education people is even higher than reported by the UWV.

"Those 8,000 people are the registered unemployed, but some people don’t report being out of work to the municipal authorities, either because they’re ashamed or because they’re afraid it will diminish their chances of a job if they have previously been registered as unemployed."

Muilwijk suspects that the unemployment figure is at least 50 per cent higher.