The EC’s expert group reveals what is behind its decision on implementing a standardised mechanism to track graduates throughout Europe by 2030.
Following our June 2020 SwissCore article, there have been updates concerning the future of a European graduate tracking mechanism. It was with the Council recommendations of 2017 that EU Member States, with support of the European Commission (EC), committed to collect information on higher education and VET graduates. To facilitate the process, a European Commission expert group on graduate tracking (October 2018 – October 2020) was created, consisting of 66 members from the European Economic Area (EEA), several EU bodies and various European stakeholders. The expert group was divided into four task forces to better handle the numerous topics related to graduate tracking: vision and options, mobile graduates, administrative data and VET learners. The recommendations resulting from the task forces’ discussions are collected in a final report.
There are numerous purposes for implementing a standardised European graduate tracking system: strengthening career guidance for students; identifying skills which are relevant for the current labour market in order to support competitiveness and innovation on local, regional and national levels; forecasting educational, social and employment needs; and contributing to policy development on national and EU levels. The first task force on vision and options focused on finding the ideal solution for organising the overall mechanism, starting from three initial options. The first option consists of a European graduate outcome project, where the system is based on already collected data, which would then be made publicly available. The second is a European-wide graduate survey covering all EEA countries based on the Eurograduate pilot survey, which takes into consideration eight European countries (Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Malta and Norway). The third option is combining available data with a new European survey. In the end, the task force deemed that the second option, a European Graduate Survey, to be the most appropriate approach, since it allows data to be gathered homogeneously and more quickly.
The second task force focused on the importance of gathering information on mobile graduate students and employees. In fact, mobility underlines one of the fundamental principles of the EU, the free movement of people. Thus, the tracking system should be able to best capture and assess the future of mobile graduates. In addition, this aspect can help study the effects of brain drain and brain gain at regional and national levels. The third task force worked on information on administrative data items. It analysed the best possible way to manage the identification of graduates, for example by using a unique identifier (ID) that allows to recognise individuals in numerous registers on the national level and across borders. This matching needs to be conducted while respecting data protection regulations and the GDPR framework. Last, the fourth task force focused on the principles and standards for vocational education and training (VET). The ideal tracking system should focus on putting learners’ right to inclusive, quality and efficient education and training at the centre of the tracking process. In addition, it should aim at covering all VET programmes and contribute to EU-level cooperation in VET.
Thus, what are the next steps after the publication of these recommendations? The EC, EU Member States and EEA countries should make political decisions regarding the European Graduate Survey, including how to manage European-level data collection, the governance model and the funding of the tracking system. One of the most important steps is to understand the role of Eurostat and of national statistical offices in the creation of the graduate tracking system. Concrete steps towards implementing the suggestions of the expert group should be taken. According to the 2020 study ‘Mapping the state of graduate tracking policies and practices in EU Member States and EEA countries’, two thirds of the studied countries already have a national version of a graduate tracking system for higher education and VET in place. The ideal timeline suggested by the expert group is to have 50% of EU Member States and EEA countries implementing a standardised tracking mechanism by 2022, 80% by 2025 and 100% by 2030.
Lastly, the report does not mention Switzerland as a country that has a graduate tracking system in place. However, we can see correlations with the Swiss Graduate survey (EHA), which focuses on the education and employment status of graduates of higher education institutions one to five years after graduation. The Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs (FDHA) conducts the survey every two years and takes into consideration all students from cantonal universities, Federal Institutes of Technology, universities of applied sciences and universities of teacher education.