Half of the young Italians who emigrate have an academic degree

There is an Italia, also numerically very substantial, that studies, graduates and then packs its bags. We are now talking about more than half of the almost 200 thousand young people who have fled abroad in recent years. And the reasons for this haemorrhage are dramatically clear: an employment rate for the under-25s that stops at under 20%, only two-thirds of young people find a job within three years of graduating (compared to over 80% of the European average) and an employment gap between North and South that touches 27 percentage points.
The alarm over this trend, which is not always well focused, is raised by the 'Rapporto di previsione Primavera 2026' (Spring 2026 forecast report) of the Confindustria Studies Centre, based on reworkings of ISTAT and Eurostat data. It has been further analysed by the Skuola.net portal, which has tried to highlight the crucial passages of the report's chapter devoted precisely to the condition of young people, highlighting the paradox of a country that is ageing but fails to retain its brightest profiles.

Between 2019 and 2023, the interval covered by the study, more than 190,000 young people decided to leave Italia to seek their fortune abroad. But the most worrying fact is not just quantitative, but qualitative: a huge chunk of those who emigrate have a high level of education. A trend that, moreover, has recorded a constant and inexorable growth in recent times: if in 2019 graduates accounted for 38.7% of emigrants, by 2020 this share had broken through the psychological threshold of half, touching 50.9% in 2023.

The narrative of this mass flight is inevitably intertwined with the motivations that drive thousands of under-35s to expatriate. The main reason is, quite simply, the lack of rapid and solid access to the labour market.
Although in Italia education, especially if of a high level, continues to represent a competitive advantage - the employment rate of university graduates is 74.3% compared to 59.3% of high school graduates - this 'premium' for studies is decidedly less than that guaranteed in other European countries.
The statistics, relative in this case to the year 2024, are unequivocal: only 67.6% of young Italians (between 20 and 34 years of age) find employment within three years of graduating. An abyss when compared with the 81% of the Eurozone average and, even more so, with the over 90% recorded in Germany.

There is not only, however, a difficulty in finding a job. Because even when one manages to get it, the 'rules of engagement' are often disappointing. And emigration fully reflects precisely the search for more job opportunities, higher salaries and better professional trajectories. It is no coincidence that among the young people most inclined to go abroad are engineers and computer scientists, exactly the same profiles for which Italian companies report the greatest difficulties in finding them, since they cannot guarantee the same advantages, in terms of salaries and career prospects, that can be found elsewhere.
More generally, entry wages in our labour market, despite having recorded a timid growth (+7% from 2022), remain relatively low in international comparison. This wage weakness is not accidental, but according to Confindustria reflects the structural characteristics of the production system in Italia, dominated by on average smaller companies, lower productivity dynamics and decidedly less structured career paths.

All this evidence fits into the framework of a chronic delay with which we present ourselves at the gates of the labour market. The problem in Italia is not just how many young people work, but when they start doing so. In 2024, the youth employment rate in the 15 to 24 age bracket stands at a paltry 19.7%, well below the European average (31.5%). The situation improves physiologically with age: the rate rises to 63.1 per cent in the 25-29 age group, and then reaches 73.9 per cent between the ages of 30 and 34. However, as the data certify, only in the regions of Northern Italia does the employment rate of 30-year-olds (at 83.3%) finally come into line with the standards of the main European economies.