A generation stopped dead in its tracks in March 2020. The health crisis linked to Covid-19 represented a “sudden stop” for young people, when they were just beginning to experience an upturn in the job market, underlines a vast survey by the Center for Studies and Research on Qualifications (Céreq), published on Tuesday 10 May. Conducted every six years among more than 25,000 people, the “Generation” survey analyzes the entry into the labor market of all those leaving the education system. This new edition retraces the paths of young people who completed their training in 2017, and who were interviewed several times five years after their entry into working life. It is the first study of such magnitude to document the consequences of the health crisis on the integration of an entire generation of young people, and its brutality.
Before the first confinement due to Covid-19 and the shutdown of the economy it caused, the indicators were green. In February 2020, three years after this generation entered the labor market, the unemployment rate among the latter had fallen by three points compared to that experienced by the previous cohort, which left the education system in 2010. The survey also highlights access to permanent contracts (CDI) “more frequent and faster”, with 68% of permanent contracts among young people in employment (up four points compared to the graduate generation in 2010, at the same period). This generation benefits at the time from a “more favorable economic conditions” on the labor market as a whole, after the effects of the 2008 crisis which had permanently weakened young people who entered working life in the early 2010s, observes Thomas Couppié, researcher at Céreq, co-author of the survey .
Massive stoppage of recruitment
These good indicators also testify to a sociological evolution, reflecting the ever-increasing massification of higher education: the generation of 2017 is more qualified than that left in 2010. In this cohort, 78% hold at least a baccalaureate, and almost half (47%) have a higher education diploma. A “symbolic threshold” about to be reached, notes the study, which however points to strong inequalities, when only 8% of workers’ children come out with a higher education diploma. Incidentally, the survey shows that the diploma remains more than ever “protector against unemployment”, underlines Elsa Personnaz, co-author. Half of the holders of a bac + 5 diploma thus rapidly gained access to a permanent contract, compared to only 5% of non-graduates.
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