How does the crisis affect employability insertion of university graduates in a context of high youth unemployment?

Is education a defense, individual and social, from the effects of the crisis in which we are living? Or does this crisis place us in a situation of overeducation, which makes raising the educational level of young people ineffective? The European Union official documents say that overcoming the crisis implies raising the educational level of young people (Strategy 2020). In Spain we are close to achieving the high educational levels that this document proposed; however, the crisis that began in 2008 increases youth unemployment levels, which are among the highest in Europe. Is it the same for university graduates? How has the crisis affected them? In this paper we propose to compare the labor insertion process of a graduate generation that entered the labor market at a time of economic expansion with another, which has done so during the crisis. We have two surveys in Catalonia (Spain) about labor insertion of graduates, a pre-crisis and another during the crisis. The first one explores the employability situation in 2008, of the people who had graduated in 2004; and the second one analyses those who graduated in 2007, who were interviewed in 2011. These surveys were carried out by the Agency for the Quality of University System of Catalonia. The comparison between the results of these surveys shows that, while the crisis has affected graduates, it has had a significantly lower impact on the level of unemployment compare to the rest of young people. Our goal is to explore the labor insertion and examine whether factors such as social origin, gender, background and academic performance affect the type of insertion achieved four years after graduating in two different contexts: that of economic expansion and that of economic crisis.