{"id":91311,"date":"2026-06-02T12:22:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/?p=91311"},"modified":"2026-06-02T12:22:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:22:48","slug":"your-education-level-is-the-difference-between-a-30-and-a-78-chance-of-employment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/2026\/06\/02\/your-education-level-is-the-difference-between-a-30-and-a-78-chance-of-employment\/","title":{"rendered":"Your education level is the difference between a 30% and a 78% chance of employment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">South Africa&#8217;s unemployment rate stood at&nbsp;<strong>32.7%<\/strong>&nbsp;in the first quarter of 2026: nearly one in three people in the labour force were out of work. The likelihood of you being one of those people depends on your education. For a degree holder, the unemployment rate is&nbsp;<strong>12.2%<\/strong>, less than half the national rate. For someone who completed matric only, it is&nbsp;<strong>35.7%<\/strong>, above the national average. For those who never finished secondary school, it reaches&nbsp;<strong>37.6%<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The education premium<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Getting any tertiary qualification \u2013 a diploma, certificate or degree \u2013 decreases your unemployment risk compared with stopping at matric. A diploma holder faces a 22.2% unemployment rate against a person with a matric&#8217;s 35.7%, a gap of around 13 percentage points. A degree narrows it further, to 12.2%: roughly a third of the rate faced by those who never completed secondary school. In a labour market where one in three people in the workforce cannot find a job, the return to post-school education is the difference between being well above or well below the national average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/theoutlier.co.za\/features\/unemployment-education\">Read the full feature<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,1454,19],"tags":[92,59,241],"newsletter-post":[],"site":[],"class_list":["post-91311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-education","category-feature","category-unemployment","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-employment"],"acf":{"post_style":"bc","show_on_front":"Yes","link_through":"Yes","big_number":"","big_number_caption":"","big_number_link":"","big_number_background":"","big_number_text_colour":"#000000","big_number_icon":false,"big_number_wide":"yes","featured_chart":false,"flourish_chart_id":"","flourish_sub_title":"","flourish_chart_width":"medium","is_newsletter_post":"No","chart_url":"","background_colour":"#0089AA","text_colour":"#FFFFFF"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91313,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91311\/revisions\/91313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91311"},{"taxonomy":"newsletter-post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newsletter-post?post=91311"},{"taxonomy":"site","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/site?post=91311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}