Five More Marks on a Portuguese Degree Are Worth 20 Percent More Salary Five Years Later, and a Semester Abroad Is Worth Nothing

A new study for EDULOG, the education foundation set up by the Fundação Belmiro de Azevedo, has put a number on something Portuguese students have argued about for decades: the final mark on a degree is worth money, and it keeps being worth money years later.

Each additional point on the final course average is associated with a 2.3 percent higher salary one year after graduation, and 4 percent five years after. Stated the way its coordinator states it, a graduate with five more marks than another earns about 20 percent more five years after finishing. The same variable is the one most consistently linked to being employed at all: students with better final averages have a lower probability of unemployment.

"We reached the conclusion that the final course average really does have an effect. Not only employability, but salary too," Ricardo Biscaia, the study's scientific coordinator, told ECO, which reported the findings on Wednesday.

The result arrives in the middle of the second phase of applications to Portugal's national higher education admissions contest, which is roughly the worst possible week for a family to be told that the choice in front of them matters more than they thought.

The finding nobody expected

The same analysis says that international experience during a degree has no significant effect. Not on salary, not on employment.

Biscaia calls this "surprising", and does not soften it: "For none of the variables, neither salary nor employment, is there a significant impact."

That is a hard result to sit with in a country that has built a large part of its higher education identity on outward mobility, and it should be read for what it is: a statement about average measurable labour market returns in Portugal, not about whether a semester in another country is worth having. Prior professional experience, by contrast, does show up as an advantage.

Where you study matters less than what you study

The study's blunter conclusion concerns institutions. The type of institution attended, whether public or private, university or polytechnic, shows in general no statistically significant effect on the probability of unemployment.

The field of study does. EDULOG describes it as the factor that most differentiates outcomes for Portuguese higher education graduates, with more weight than the type of institution, and it separates people on both the risk of unemployment and the quality of the job: pay, contractual stability, professional satisfaction and the fit between training and work.

Graduates of Arts, Psychology, Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, Humanities and Languages carry a probability of unemployment at least ten percentage points higher than graduates of Engineering, Manufacturing Industries and Construction. The gap narrows five years out but stays significant. The engineering side also shows positive salary differentials and higher satisfaction; several areas of Arts, Humanities, Wellbeing and Services show less favourable results across the different dimensions of job quality.

The overqualification numbers are the ones worth pinning to a noticeboard. Overqualification here means holding a job that normally requires less education than you have. Among Humanities graduates, more than half are in that position. Services reaches 50 percent and Arts 46.3 percent. In Medicine the figure is 6.2 percent.

A master's degree still helps, in the sense that it is associated with a lower probability of unemployment than a bachelor's. But the study records that after five years that difference stops being statistically significant.

The gender gap that appears late

Women graduates show a significantly higher probability of unemployment, the study finds, but only five years after finishing the course. Alongside it they show less contractual stability, significantly lower pay, lower levels of job satisfaction and a greater risk of overqualification.

The timing is the interesting part. A gap that is not visible at one year and is visible at five is not a gap in what employers think of a new graduate's qualifications.

Biscaia is careful that the study does not offer an explanation, and then offers a hypothesis anyway, pointing at the role women still occupy in society and the labour market, and specifically at parenthood. "The responsibilities of the mother and the father are still different," he said, suggesting that reduced availability feeds into hiring and promotion decisions.

Nobody has to publish this, which is the actual scandal

EDULOG's policy recommendation is not a funding demand. It is a transparency demand: more and better information on the professional outcomes of different fields of study, aimed at students, families and institutions, so that people can understand what happens to graduates and choose on that basis. The public role, in its words, should be mainly about strengthening transparency on pay, contractual stability, satisfaction and the fit between training and employment.

The reason this is a recommendation and not a description is that Portuguese law leaves the collection of graduate outcome data to the institutions themselves. Biscaia told ECO that the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) has already recommended greater transparency here, and then described what the current arrangement produces: "Some do it, others do not. Among those that do, some publish, others do not. And among those that publish, they do not necessarily use the same methodology."

His framing of why that matters is the sharpest line in the study's coverage. "It is a serious problem. More than an efficiency problem (knowing which courses the market needs more or less of), it is an equity problem." Better-off families, he points out, already know which courses work.

That is worth restating plainly, because it is the practical consequence for anyone reading this from outside the Portuguese school system. In the absence of a single published national dataset on what graduates of each course actually earn, the information exists but circulates privately, through families who have people to ask. Foreign residents putting a child through Portuguese higher education for the first time are, almost by definition, on the wrong side of that.

How the study was built

The project is registered with EDULOG as EDULOG/MTDES/2024, "Resultados no mercado de trabalho dos diplomados do ensino superior português" (Labour market outcomes of Portuguese higher education graduates), run out of CIPES with eight researchers, coordinated by Ricardo Biscaia and including Cláudia Sarrico, Hugo Figueiredo, Pedro Luís Silva, Pedro Videira and Victor Rudakov.

Its declared method is to synthesise three separate databases on graduate employability in Portugal: the Quadros de Pessoal employer records, the Eurograduate Survey 2022, and INE's Inquérito ao Emprego (Labour Force Survey), organised as far down as the data allows, and then to contrast that with the register of unemployed graduates held by the IEFP. The project's stated aims include recommendations on the management of places across courses, levels and institutions, and on how Portugal might operationalise a fuller information process on graduate outcomes in the first place, which is exactly what the published findings end on.

One caveat on sourcing. The findings above are as reported by ECO on Wednesday, from an interview with the coordinator and from the study text. The report itself was not on EDULOG's own studies page when we checked in the early hours of Thursday, so the figures here have not been read against the original document.

Reading it alongside what Portugal already spends

Portugal has spent the past two years attaching money to higher education outcomes rather than measuring them. It began refunding tuition to 41,000 young graduates under the Prémio Salarial in August, and it raised the displaced-student housing grant to 161 euros a month the same month. An earlier FFMS study found that each euro invested in higher education returns 13.7 euros in salary gains, while Portuguese families carry 30 percent of the cost. The EDULOG numbers are the missing half of that arithmetic: the return is not evenly distributed, and the distribution follows the course far more than the institution.

It also cuts across the way Portuguese higher education is publicly ranked and argued about. The government's degrees-and-diplomas reform adding numeracy and English tests was fought over on access grounds, and the annual QS ranking positions of Coimbra, Lisbon, Porto and Nova get reported as if the choice of institution were the decision that determined a career. On this evidence it mostly is not. Meanwhile the pipeline itself has thinned: the secondary school completion rate slid 10.7 points, pushing graduate numbers back to pre-pandemic levels.

None of which tells a seventeen year old what to study. What it does say is that the mark they get at the end is not a formality, that the department they pick will follow them into their thirties, and that the country has not yet organised itself to tell them any of this before they choose.