The graduate employment rate is the proportion between students employed full or part time within 12 months after graduation and students from the same cohort who are unemployed but seeking employment in the same period.
Students pursuing further studies, unavailable to work, working part-time or not seeking employment are excluded from this calculation. Whenever this figure is not available, we use the minimum recorded rate for the country (or region if the number of domestic data points are insufficient).
The rates are adjusted if they refer to a timeline different to 12 months.
In several countries, the timeline of survey collection and methodology is slightly different than QS’s. An additional concern is that the economic conditions of a country also have a great influence on the employability prospects of students post-graduation. Thereby, in order to normalise the effects of such factors, QS built the scores using a comparison between the universities’ graduate employment rate and the national (or regional) average of tertiary education employment rate, as well as between universities’ graduate employment rate and the global average.
This indicator is currently used in our Graduate Employability Ranking.