June is approaching and many high school students are facing a major impasse in their lives: EvAU exams To access the university. While some already know which career to sign up for, a large percentage find themselves in a significant dilemma, especially regarding their future. Job opportunities for each degree and the professional success it can bring them.

Some careers have 100% employability, while others are at the opposite extreme. It’s like philosophy.

Career with fewest job opportunities. In this career, less than one in five students graduating in the last five years have been unable to find a job related to their education. According to research Young university students and employability, qualifications, emerging professions and job transitionconducted by CEU and Randstad research INE data18.4% of the students enrolled in this department are unable to work on their own. To determine this statistic, the work history of 31,000 students surveyed during the five years after graduation was analyzed.

The research also reveals some things Key differences between private and public universitiesIn the latter, the unemployment rate is twice as high: 8.7% versus 4.9%.

Yet they keep choosing it. Although employability figures are not encouraging, many students they keep choosing this class in spain. A career that is already a professional choice rather than a means to find a job. In fact, more and more young people in our country decide to study Philosophy. According to this Ministry of Universities dataThe number of students enrolled in this discipline has increased by almost 10% in the last three years.

Humanities are in crisis, but not in Spain. Humanist careers such as History, Literature, Philology or Philosophy in much of the world A significant decrease of 30% to 50% was recorded in the number of students. Many students moved on to more technical careers. The number of science, technology, engineering, math and health students in the United States increased from 400,000 in 2010 to more than 800,000 in 2020.

But in Spain the situation is very different: enrollment numbers for humanities-related degrees continue and some They even increase the number of students Like History, which added 300 more students during this period, Philosophy more than 2,000 and Arts and Humanities, more than 4,000. All this knowing that their employability is currently at rock bottom.

They have no regrets. If we asked graduates if they would return to reexamine their careers, in most cases they would say no, especially when they have been facing the fierce battle in business for some time. Actually, According to other studies38% of job seekers are university graduates They regretted the diploma they received chosen person. In 2014, more than one in three undergraduate students said they would either choose to pursue another career or pursue another career five years from now. He directly regretted going to university. But Philosophy is not one of them.

The most common are Journalism (87%), Sociology (72%), Arts (72%), Communication (64%) and Teaching (61%). Additionally, more than half of those who completed a degree in documentation, audiovisual techniques or Tourism Five years later they thought they were wrong.

It may change in the future. But be careful, because tech companies see it as increasingly valuable to have the critical thinking and creativity that philosophy provides. Like We have analyzed it in other Xataka articlesCompanies such as Google, IBM or Microsoft have been hiring dozens of Philosophy graduates for several years to help them solve ethical and moral problems caused by certain technological advances. Suffice it to say Reid HoffmanFounder of LinkedIn, Peter Thielco-founder of PayPal or Mauricio LapastoraDr., former director of Toshiba and Fujitsu Siemens.

So, who has the most job opportunities? Even though philosophy is at the bottom, Electronics Engineering is currently at the top of the list of employability. And the difference between the two is huge: The unemployment rate five years after graduation is 18.4% versus 0.9%. The demand for engineers and scientists in the labor market is much higher than it was a few decades ago. Another department that offers good job opportunities is medicine. And as we mentioned above This articleThe goose that lays the golden egg of engineering, which despite its almost 100% employability is losing more enrollments every year due to students’ lack of knowledge: agricultural engineering.

Pictures | Pexels (Andrea Piacquadio)

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*An earlier version of this article was published in June 2023.