"Check-out manager, butcher manager, bakery manager." With these imposing titles, one of the supermarket chains is trying to recruit new employees for a new store in a newspaper advert. A college or university degree would be an advantage for each of these jobs, even though "supervising the check-out lines, ensuring that shoppers do not have to wait and ensuring the warehouse is tidy" are all tasks that could be carried out by someone with a secondary school diploma. But over the past two years the number of young jobseekers who have arrived fresh from colleges and universities has risen sharply, and many of them are being forced into jobs where secondary schooling would be enough. Work with appropriate responsibilities and pay is increasingly hard to find.

The number of unemployed first job seekers has jumped from 40,000 in December 2004 to 50,000 in September 2005. The most recent figures from the Central Statistical Office show that the unemployment rate amongst the 15-24 age group has risen from 16.6% to 20.4% in a single year. The average in the EU-15 is 16.9%, the EU-10 average was 18.4% last year. Statistics lie, of course: whilst the numbers suggest that unemployment is highest amongst the less educated (at 30%), in reality it is graduates who are finding jobseeking harder.

László Tóth of the Employment Ministry told HVG: "Crowding out on the labour market has begun." Although graduates still find a job more easily than the average jobseeker - 82% of graduates find work within a year of finishing their studies, compared to less than 30% of school leavers - the job they find is often below their skill level. In Western Europe, call centres are not necessarily manned by graduates, in Hungary, more than 10,000 graduates have found telephone customer service work over the past decade. "The value of a degree has been eroded from a jobseeking point of view," said György László, the CEO of Sykes Central Europe, which specialises in providing call centre services. There are increasing numbers of graduate secretaries and "office managers" - who have been 'promoted' by having their job title translated from Hungarian into English. These graduate jobseekers are taking jobs from the less well qualified. The Economics Institute of the Academy has calculated that between 1995 and 2005, graduates took 47,000 jobs from school leavers, who in turn took 125,000 jobs from the still less well educated.

University admissions have doubled in ten years. Experts say that there has been huge excess supply of graduates on the jobs market over the past two years. Furthermore, most of them are arts graduates, economists or communications graduates. At the same time, there is a shortage of logistics experts or IT experts with language skills. János Köllő, a senior researcher at the Economics Institute expects that university admissions will eventually adapt to market demand. He argues that excess supply has cut graduates' wage advantage over school leavers by 40% in recent years. "If there had been no pay rise for civil servants then the relative decline would have been even greater, since 60% of graduate jobseekers start working in public institutions," he said. The graduate minimum wage, introduced in the public sector in 2002, has slightly slowed the devaluation process. The graduate minimum wage is, at HUF112,000, almost twice as high as the general minimum wage. The government is planning a similar measure in the private sector, but it has not as yet reached agreement with employers' organisations.

Employers seem suspicious of career starters. "Because of their lack of experience, it costs more to employ them than their older colleagues, even counting the various incentives," said Judit Bujdosó, a social policy expert. Incentives introduced at the beginning of the year have largely been ignored by employers. If companies employ a beginner for at least nine months, they get a 50% discount on social security contributions, provided they do not sack the young colleague during the following three months. "This horizon is too distant for employers," admitted one official at the Employment Ministry.