The recent economic recession sparked redundancies in nearly all occupations, however a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in many nations it was found that college graduates were less likely to become unemployed than their less-educated counterparts.

The Education at a Glance 2010: OECD Indicators report showed that the unemployment rate among college graduates was between two and four times lower than those workers with only a high school diploma.

The study, which has recently been released, is the latest in an annual series which analyses data amongst its 31 member countries. Researchers used data from 2008 and 2009 and were able to draw conclusions about the impact the economic crisis had on the relationship between education and employment.

Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD unit that produces the Education at a Glance series said that “In some countries, people with higher education were almost unaffected by the crisis, whereas the crisis really hit hard the people in the lower end of the spectrum,” He then went onto say that in a moment of crisis and in a high-wage economy “people who don’t really live up to those economies’ needs have a really hard time.”

Younger workers were particularly affected.  The unemployment rate among 15 to 29 year olds in Hungary who had a college degree was about 2%, compared with about 12 percent among workers without a high-school diploma. There was also a similar outcome in Ireland where there was a 7% rate of unemployment among college graduates compared with 15% of those without a high school diploma.

Mr Schleicher went on to say that “everyone asks, ‘When is this going to level off? When are we going to see declining returns on better-qualified people?’ And it just hasn’t happened. You can still see, in most countries, those who are better qualified are better off.”