There is much that is poorly diagnosed and treatment planned: the model of higher education followed by Portugal in recent decades needs to be changed. For years we talk on the need to review the offer. When you end another school year and prepares the next theme back again to the fore because of the disclosure of two studies on the subject - the Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES) and another (one more base data from a study that properly) the Directorate General of Higher Education.

The first shows that 80% of the study areas in Portugal have an excess of vacant and available for 53 500 in 2011 to undergraduate and integrated master's, only registered 46, 642 applications. This means that 6858 remained unfilled.

If in the first attests the existence of irrationality and uncontrolled in the creation of some courses, the second presents the data in a painful reality for more than 108, 000 graduates Portugal (INE data, 4. Quarter 2011): unemployment. Ie, the country has no job to one in 10 of the most qualified members of its workforce active (see infographic).

Having the employability of higher education as the core of their work, the DGES crossed the INE statistics and the number of unemployed graduates enrolled in the Institute of Employment and Vocational Training (about 60 000, ie well below estimates INE) with the 571, 000 graduates, licensed, masters and PhDs produced by the national higher education system in the last ten years.

This statistic lets say (perhaps with some exaggeration, yet legitimate), in Portugal, there are courses that are a sort of Via Verde for unemployment, because the data submitted, once again, to the spreadsheet, we find that unemployment among graduates has grown by 50% in five years, when the growth of the overall unemployment was 33 per cent (see infographic).

And the prospects are not exactly laughing. "The market is saturated and unemployment will continue to rise, " says Fernando Neves de Almeida, President of Boyden Portugal, a company specializing in the recruitment of staff. The manager believes that the labor market, only reverse this trend in the late summer of next year. Until then, the unemployment rate is expected to remain growing.

Employability is a key word, around which revolve the measures that will be taken or already underway. In these pages we will give you a table of the 30 most highly rated courses superior in terms of placement in the labor market.

Data from DGES show that between 2001 and 2010, Portugal was in 4154 higher education to produce graduates. Of these, 1421-1 in three - shows unemployment rates higher than the average of 10% estimated by INE for holders of higher education.

These are cases that are now in the crosshairs of government, which, through an order of the Secretary of State for Higher Education, John Queiró, wants to ban as early as next school year, the public higher education institutions to increase the number of vacancies in courses that do not prove their employability. Ie, the standard may, at least theoretically, apply to one-third of the top courses. In this case, the schools have to redistribute the number of places available for courses with the highest increase in employment. Namely: "Science, Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering."