VietNamNet Bridge - The Ministries all admitted that the rate of unemployed university graduates is ‘abnormally high’, but none of them has taken responsibility for this.

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Students looking for jobs at a career fair

In the third quarter of 2015 alone, 50,000 workers with bachelor’s degrees were added to the list of unemployed, according to MOLISA. To date, 225,500 workers with bachelor’s degrees cannot find jobs.

The last updated labor market bulletin showed that 20 percent of 1,128,700 unemployed workers have university education and the number of unemployed university graduates is on the rise.

The number of unemployed junior college graduates has reached 117,300 by the end of the third quarter, an increase of 24,100 compared with the second quarter.

The number of students in 2009-2010 increased by 47 percent compared with 2004-2005 from 1.3 million to 1.9 million. The figure rose to 2.1 million in 2010-2011 and reached the highest peak of 2.2 million in 2011-2012.
The workers finishing junior college (3-year training) and university (4-5 year training) now top the list of unemployed workers: 8 percent of the former group and 5 percent of the latter stay redundant.

According to Dao Trong Thi, chair of the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, the Youth and Children, there are two reasons behind the figures.

First, the Vietnam economy still cannot create enough jobs for workers in general, not only for workers with a bachelor’s degree.

Second, university and junior college graduates cannot find jobs because of the unreasonable training program which is not based on reliable information about demand. Meanwhile, the training quality is problematic. 

When answering the National Assembly’s inquiries about the high unemployment rate of junior college and university graduates, Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan attributed this to the economic recession which caused the lack of jobs. He also cited other reasons, including poor forecasts about labor demand and training quality.

However, experts pointed out that the high unemployment rate of university graduates is caused by oversupply. The number of students in 2009-2010 increased by 47 percent compared with 2004-2005 from 1.3 million to 1.9 million. The figure rose to 2.1 million in 2010-2011 and reached the highest peak of 2.2 million in 2011-2012.

This means that in 2011-2014, Vietnam had over 400,000 students finishing junior colleges and universities each year. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed graduates in 2014 was twice as many as in 2010.

MOLISA’s former Deputy Minister Nguyen Thanh Hoa, when commenting about the high unemployment rate of university graduates, said MOLISA is not responsible for the low rate, because it is just the agency which creates policies and releases documents to regulate the labor market.

Meanwhile, Thi said creating jobs is the task of the national economy, while MOLISA is the state’s management agency in this field.


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