According to the Graduates Statistics 2020 published by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM), there were 5.36 million graduates in 2020, an increase of 4.4 percent from 2019 (5.13 million). 202,400 of them, or 4.4 percent, were unemployed, which is an increase from 165,200 (3.9 percent) in 2019.
Nevertheless, many recent graduates are still struggling to find full-time employment.
According to the graduate tracer study conducted by the Ministry of Higher Education, the marketability of Malaysian graduates in 2020 dropped by 1.8 percent to 84.4 percent compared to 86.2 percent in 2019. This was attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic.