Mission and aims of the project
The EUROGRADUATE Pilot Survey was launched with the goal of creating and implementing a regular, comprehensive, comparable and longitudinal European data collection on higher education graduates. It is part of the European Graduate Tracking Initiative of the European Commission and implements the recommendations of the European Commission expert group on graduate tracking on consecutively building a European graduate tracking mechanism. Ultimately, EUROGRADUATE aims at covering all countries of the European Economic Area (EEA).
The EUROGRADUATE project series consists of
- EUROGRADUATE 2022 - the 2nd phase of the European pilot survey of higher education graduates (2022-2024)
- EUROGRADUATE 2018 - the 1st European pilot survey of higher education graduates (2018-2019)
- The EUROGRADUATE Feasibility study (2013-2016)
The project pursues to monitor educational pathways of graduates, how they evaluate their study experiences, and how that translates into their professional careers and lives as European citizens. EUROGRADUATE addresses the need for comparable and high quality measures and data on graduates of the European education systems.
More specifically the project has the following objectives:
- Develop tools and processes for the collection of comparable data in the participating countries
- Support the participating countries in all steps of preparing and conducting the data collection as well as in processing, handling, and analyzing the data.
- Coordinate the data collection in the participating countries
- Process the data and prepare an international micro-level data set covering all participating countries
- Analyse the data and prepare a comparative synthesis report on key results across all topics of the EUROGRADUATE survey
- Disseminate project results, publications, and outputs, including a scientific use file of the data
- Assess the project organisation, data collection, and data quality and derive recommendations and proposals for the further development of the European graduate survey
EUROGRADUATE is funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union. The study is carried out by an international consortium of experienced organisations that are specialized on conducting large-scale international survey projects in the field of higher education (see who we are). It is coordinated by the German Centre for Higher Education Research on Science Studies (DZHW).
Participating pilot countries
Methodology
The pilot survey covers graduates one and five years after graduation to monitor the short-term and the mid-term development of graduates. Thus, for EUROGRADUATE 2022 the target group are all graduates of the academic years 2020/21 and 2016/17 on ISCED-2011 levels 6 (Bachelor) and 7 (Master or long degree programs). ISCED 5 programs (short courses) are included, if they can be classified as higher education on national level. Moreover, countries are free to include graduates of ISCED 8 programs (doctoral studies) for their national data collection.
The precise sampling strategy is determined by the consortium in close collaboration with each respective country (taking the characteristics of the specific country into account) to strive for a sufficient number of respondents providing reliable outcomes for different gender, age, socioeconomic background, and broad field of study groups.
The pilot survey is an online-survey. The consortium provides the master questionnaire and support for setting-up and conducting the data collections within countries. The pilot countries are responsible for programming the online survey in their country and implementing the data collection. Countries can choose to supplement or replace survey data by register data if comparable.
Results of the EUROGRADUATE 2018 pilot survey are available here. Results of the EUROGRADUATE 2022 pilot survey are to be expected for the second half of 2024.
Core Topics EUROGRADUATE 2022
The EUROGRADUATE 2022 questionnaire covers a range of topics reflecting the graduates' personal and social background, their educational career, the transition to work and their work history, their skills and job satisfaction as well as social outcomes. The questionnaire is split in three modules: essential (module A), recommended (module B), and optional information (module C). The essentials are covered by all 17 participating countries, whereas module B is additionally covered by 14/17 and module C by 9/17 countries. A detailed description of the specific core topics of each module can be found in the graphic below.
The EUROGRADUATE 2022 master questionnaire can be found here.
