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Academics issue warning over levels of graduate emigration

Portuguese academic associations are warning that a majority of students are considering emigration after they complete their courses, because job opportunities are scant and salaries too low to secure a good living standard.

Surveys by the Coimbra Academic Association of the University of Coimbra (founded in 1290) and the Porto Academic Federation (Federação Académica do Porto – FAP), a platform for all higher education student associations in Portugal’s second city, released worrying data ahead of the country’s March parliamentary elections.

Among 1,272 students polled at University of Coimbra (55.6% aged between 17 and 20-years-old), only 43 students believed it was possible to become “financially independent with the salary conditions that the country has”.

The survey, organised by the Coimbra Academic Association (Associação Académica de Coimbra – AAC) revealed that 66.9% was considering emigrating.

Potential emigrants were particularly concentrated in the Faculty of Science and Technology, the Faculty of Economics, and the Faculty of Pharmacy. That said, 74.6% of these students said they wanted to return to Portugal later.

When asked about the main reasons that lead youth to leave Portugal, 96.3% of all respondents mentioned salary, 73.3% job availability, 67.3% career development, 48.3% personal ambition and 37.9% conditions of public services provided in Portugal, such as health.

Most respondents agreed that young Portuguese people face financial instability (92.5%) and challenges to find housing (83.5%), with concern about access to employment at 68%, access to mental healthcare (21.5%), and access to healthcare (14.2%).

Faced with these problems, the average age at which young people finally leave their parents is 29.7, which is above the European Union average of 26.4, according to the European Union (EU) statistical agency Eurostat.

The other survey, released in late February by the Porto Academic Federation, corroborated these findings: among 1,002 students at private and public higher education institutions in Porto, half of them considered emigrating after finishing their degrees.

A ‘very worrying reality’

As at Coimbra, science and technology students were most disaffected.

The same survey revealed that “a third of students believe that their first [monthly] salary will be less than €1,000”, despite their higher qualifications in a country with a minimum wage of €820 per month.

Renato Daniel, president at Coimbra’s AAC since December 2023, told University World News that the association decided to survey students following a news story released in January 2023 which said that 30% of young people born in Portugal live outside the country and 70% of recent emigrants are under 40-years-old, based on information provided by Rui Pena Pires, scientific co-ordinator of the country’s Observatory of Emigration.

Daniel sees a “very worrying reality” especially considering that the students that plan to leave the country are mainly from areas of research, science and technology, which “will most likely be the future of our country”.

With a new centre-right government in power following the elections, the AAC president believes the biggest challenge for public policies is to “urgently find a way to raise salaries”. He added that paying high taxes is not an issue for Portugal’s student community if they “translate into efficient services”, something that is lacking with “no adequate response to many of the problems” the society faces.

In his view, the second main reason for students wanting to leave is housing, with many students considering abandoning higher education because they cannot afford high rents.

Brain circulation

Daniel also wants solutions for low youth employment and better career development.

According to the Bank of Portugal, the country’s central bank, the youth unemployment rate (from 19 to 24 years old) was 23.9% in the last quarter of 2023.

Pedro Góis, associate professor with aggregation of sociology and research methods at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the same university, told University World News: “There is not much work available in any area in Portugal”, except for health-related and IT jobs.

“The job market is not adequately rewarding,” he said, noting that as students usually must leave their home community anyway to study or find employment, often having to move to Portugal’s coastal regions, they would rather do it for a better salary in another country.

Indeed, Portugal is suffering from the fact that students “perceive the world as a global job market”, since “in the last 20 years, different countries have opened up the possibility for highly qualified migrants to have an almost global circulation”.

Therefore, today’s “brain drain" is a global brain circulation that impacts all countries, except those that pay professionals the best salaries.

He finds a similar trend in other southern European countries, such as Spain or Italy, although their exodus is not as strong as Portugal’s, given they have larger job markets.

Góis said this was partly a result of the EU’s single labour market, which encourages movement.

Of course, Britain is no longer part of that market, so Góis noted that while in the past many nurses left Portugal for the UK, today they are targeting the Netherlands and northern European countries. Germany and Middle East countries are also hiring health workers from Portugal, he said, adding that engineering professions are also very global and often engineers are hired in Portugal by international companies and then allocated to projects abroad.

That said, some remote workers may stay put after securing work with foreign software companies, banks, or consultants – and work from home.

Daniel added that, based on his perceptions, Portuguese science and technology students especially prefer Nordic countries and Germany, with Germany favoured because it has “very advanced research conditions” and offers better job security to researchers, who often have precarious contracts in Portugal.

And when graduates physically leave Portugal, the country has a net “loss of public investment” after training students who then “stop paying taxes”, especially when the country does not attract the same number of “other young people from other countries with the same qualifications”, said Góis. A related risk is “the country will age demographically” and lose “in terms of creativity”.

University of Coimbra studies have shown that 4% of Portuguese people who leave the country return, some “after a few months of unsuccessful experiences and then never leave again”, while some “return and leave more often, in a circular migration”. There are also some who “tend to return only at the end of their professional career and, therefore, much later than when the country would like them to do so”, added the sociologist.

Fixing fundamentals

To Góis, the solution does not lie in aligning higher education programmes with the current needs of the country because that would kill innovation, since higher education entities train students to have the “ability to think beyond the job market”.

The professor believes the problem would be better solved if the government asked young Portuguese “what would actually make them return or make them stay” and planned higher education accordingly.

Furthermore, the government should work on fundamental issues, such as housing, taxes, healthcare, better remuneration and a career policy that facilitates career progression and rewards merit and training, he argued.

He also noted that the way higher education institutions are organised “in faculties, in departments, in courses within departments, means that most of the time we lose sight of the whole”, which “prevents us from growing”.

Góis praised the Dutch strategy of attracting foreign students to take further degrees leading them to stay afterwards, adding that Portugal should invest more in this strategy, especially taking advantage of sharing the Portuguese language with several countries, including the Lusophone “giant” Brazil (with 215 million people compared to Portugal’s 10.4 million).

Daniel stressed that Portuguese students prefer to study in their own country, even though students’ mobility and the ability to “seek experiences abroad” is positive and “much faster and much more efficient” thanks to the EU. And as a result, the professor is optimistic that the problems fuelling student emigration will be solved in the future to retain the “most qualified generation ever” in Portugal.