Youth Unemployment and Mismatch in the Turkish Labour Market

This paper analyses youth unemployment and education–job mismatch in Turkey using individual-level data from the Turkish Statistical Institute(TÜİK) Labour Force Statistics for 2015. The youth (15–24) unemployment rate stands at 18.5%, more than double the adult (25–64) rate of 8.8%, with a pronounced gender gap: female youth face a 22.2% unemployment rate against 16.5% for males. Unemployment is highest among college-educated youth (29.5%), alongside high labour-force participation (75.1%) in this group. We construct two qualification-mismatch indicators for employed youth. Vertical mismatch - education level relative to the occupational modal - affects 53% of employed college graduates and 49% of vocational high school graduates, who work in occupations where the typical worker has lower formal education. Horizontal mismatch, field of education relative to occupation, is estimable for the 27.5% of employed youth with a field-of-education code; unmatched rates are highest for health and welfare (81%), humanities, arts, and social sciences (78%), and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (68%) graduates. Logistic regression models confirm that female youth face significantly higher unemployment odds (OR = 1.31), that higher education is associated with greater overeducation risk (OR = 8.3 per education step), and that horizontal mismatch varies substantially across fields of study and regions. These findings are consistent with persistent misalignments between formal education and observed job allocation in Turkey, with implications for vocational education, graduate employment policy, and the school-to-work transition.