Bachelors, masters constitute 20% of unemployed people in Vietnam
Thursday, December 31, 2015, 18:30 GMT+7
The number of university graduates and holders of higher academic degrees becoming jobless has increased in Vietnam, reaching 225,500 people or 20 percent of the unemployed, the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs said on Thursday.
It has jumped from a total of 199,000 unemployed skilled workers in the third quarter.
In addition, another 117,300 people who have an associate’s degree are also out of work now in Vietnam.
About 114,000 bachelors and 135,000 associate’s degree holders have to do menial jobs which require no certificate or diploma.
Vietnam currently has 7.3 percent of the young people aged from 15 to 24 still seeking jobs, up from 6.68 percent three months ago, according to the ministry’s statistics.
The overall unemployment rate in Vietnam is 2.35 percent.
Going along with the increasing unemployment rate is a big difference between supply of and demand for labor in several careers, especially in Hanoi.
In the capital city, the job supply in office and administrative management is 12.6 times higher than demand. It is 11.8 times for accounting and auditing, 3-5 times for sales, and 2-3 times for information technology.
The rising rate of joblessness shows a big gap between the demand of the job market and the training capacity of universities as the supply factor, said Dr. Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, director of the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs.
Of around a million students finishing high school every year, 90 percent target to enter universities and the remaining ten percent apply for vocational training schools.
Hoang Ngoc Vinh, head of the department of occupational education under the Ministry of Education and Training, refuted claims that the mushrooming of universities is to blame for the surging unemployment rate.
He said university graduates make up only seven percent of the workforce in the nation, much lower than the level of 25-30 percent in other developed countries.
So what matters is, according to Vinh, the quality of higher education.
The training programs have failed to meet the demand of the job market, he said.
