Overview
- A representative EY survey shows only 39% of students are now sure they will quickly find a job that matches their qualifications, a drop of 15 percentage points from 2024.
- Nearly half of respondents (49%) say they rather expect a successful job start, while the share who are pessimistic doubled to 12% from 6% two years earlier.
- Job security is now the top employer choice, named by 52% of students, with salary about nine percentage points behind and flexible hours at 41%.
- EY executive Jan-Rainer Hinz described the findings as a paradigm shift toward security and linked falling optimism to the current economic slowdown and rising academic unemployment.
- The survey was conducted online in March 2026 by a market-research institute for EY with more than 2,000 students and has been run every two years since 2014, a pattern that lets analysts compare changing student priorities over time.