Youth Unemployment and Mismatch in the Turkish Labour Market

This paper analyses youth unemployment and education–job mismatch inTurkey using individual-level data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK)Labour Force Statistics for 2015. The youth (15–24) unemployment rate standsat 18.5%, more than double the adult (25–64) rate of 8.8%, with a pronouncedgender 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 constructtwo qualification-mismatch indicators for employed youth. Vertical mismatch -education level relative to the occupational modal - affects 53% of employedcollege graduates and 49% of vocational high school graduates, who work inoccupations where the typical worker has lower formal education. Horizontalmismatch - field of education relative to occupation - is estimable for the27.5% of employed youth with a field-of-education code; unmatched rates arehighest 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 higherunemployment odds (OR = 1.31), that higher education is associated withgreater overeducation risk (OR = 8.3 per education step), and that horizontalmismatch varies substantially across fields of study and regions. These findingsare consistent with persistent misalignments between formal education andobserved job allocation in Turkey, with implications for vocational education,graduate employment policy, and the school-to-work transition.