Grads shun risk, target civil service
University graduates prefer to secure a comfortable future in the civil service instead of embarking on the far riskier path of setting up their own businesses, according to a survey released yesterday of more than 3,000 graduates from Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University. Students who graduated between 1998 and 2000 were interviewed for the poll, which revealed that 84 percent of them were employed but that 63 percent of them would like to be civil servants. Currently, a third of the graduates are employed in the public sector, known for its substantive benefits and lifelong job security. Only 8 percent of respondents wanted to work in the private sector, even though 23 percent were already employed by private firms. Six in 10 graduates said they had never thought of starting their own business. «This displays a wrong attitude for our era but also for the future,» said Yiannis Antonopoulos, dean of the university. «We cannot have a state with a large number of people who want to become civil servants, when the general direction is for private initiatives to grow.»
