The Ministry of Science has new data on studies that offer good job prospects

"At the moment we have an employee market, not an employer employee, so virtually all young people can take a job immediately after graduating from high school. The question is whether they should rush into it, or rather gain skills that are in high demand. Thanks to the ELA system, today every high school graduate can choose not only the university, but also the course that will give the best career prospects" - said Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Science and Higher Education Jarosław Gowin on Friday.

The Minister of Science spoke about choosing a course of study during the presentation of a new version of the ELA system, which - using ZUS and POL-on databases - allows to monitor the careers of university graduates. The system generates reports on the economic situation of graduates of 2014 and 2015.

The system ELA (ela.nauka.gov.pl) monitors the economic situation of university graduates. It has been developed by specialists from the Evaluation of Educational Quality Laboratory of the University of Warsaw. The tool allows to monitor the economic situation of graduates of all Polish higher education institutions.

Thanks to the system, we already know, among other things, that graduates of master\'s course in computer science at Warsaw University of Technology have the highest salaries - acciording to the information provided at the presentation of the new version of the system in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. It is also known that graduates of management and production engineering (full-time studies) at the Lublin University of Technology find jobs faster than others. In turn, unemployment is lowest among Architecture and Urban Studies graduates from the University of Science and Technology in Bydgoszcz.

The system ELA monitors the situation of university graduates since 2016 and covers the last two years of graduates - the new version of the system tracks the graduates who completed their studies in 2014 and 2015. The main source of information in the system are the administrative data provided by the Social Security Institution and POL-on (Integrated Information System for Higher Education).

"This is a unique tool. The best in the opinion of experts, world\'s best tool of this kind to study the situation of graduates" - emphasised Gowin.

Asked about what studies too choose, Deputy Prime Minister noted that Poland needs 100 thousand computer specialists. "It not a question of how quickly you will find a job after graduating in computer science from individual universities anymore - but what the salary range is, because it turns out that in some cases it is several times difference" - he pointed out.

The latest ELA results allow to find out how graduates of different majors and universities are doing on the labour market. Information about their salaries and how long they spend looking for jobs, according to the ministry of education, may help future students choose the best path, and the teachers in the professional direction of the students.

The author of the system Prof. Mikołaj Jasiński from the University of Warsaw explained that the system allows to find out how fast graduates of particular colleges and majors find jobs, how many employers they have, how often they change jobs, what percentage of them continue to study after obtaining a diploma. The data can be compared on a scale of different Polish regions.

Among the new functionalities of ELA (compared to the previous version) Prof. Jasiński mentioned the possibility of checking the dynamics of earnings and unemployment (because the system has data on 2015 and 2016 graduates). It is also possible to check the number of self-employed graduates.

"One of the myths that we bust is the myth that once existed that graduates massively undertake self-employment. That\'s not true - it\'s generally a few percent, but there are exceptions" - said Prof. Jasiński. As one of those exceptions, he mentioned graduates of dentistry, over 60 percent of whom, on average, start a company in the second year after graduation.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

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