Cape Town - Although the unemployment rate among people with tertiary qualifications is a lot lower than that among people with lesser qualifications, the rate more than doubled from 6.4% to 15.3% between 1995 and 2002.
The unemployment rate amongst unskilled workers, however dropped from 33.1% to 32.3% in the same review period.
Haroon Bhorat, a researcher at the University of Cape Town, presented these results to the portfolio committee on finance on Tuesday.
Bhorat said the surprise finding concerning the highly skilled, as well as a relatively strong rise in joblessness among people with matric (from 25.2% to 39.5%) showed that the education institutions in South Africa were not up to date with the labour market needs.
The highest unemployment rate is still among people who have only a primary school education (a rise from 35.4% tot 41.3%) and among those who have a high school education but no matric, which has risen from 33.8% to 48.3%.
Bhorat said another problem was that too many pupils and tertiary students avoid maths and science courses - skills that the labour market needed most.
He feels that an effort should be made to move away from using matriculants as the success criteria in schools. Instead, the country needs to look at how many matriculants passed maths and science on the higher grade.
Bhorat said the problem of oversupply in some skills is evident in the rise in unemployment among black graduates, which rose from 10% in 1995 to 25.9% in 2002.
The unemployment rate among coloureds had remained relatively flat (8.5% to 9.8%), while it had risen from 2.26% to 4.63% among white graduates.
Bhorat said that skill shortages, along with crime, Afro-pessimism and labour legislation were limiting investment and growth in the South African economy.
He suggested that the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration was made more effective so that less time and money was spent on it.
According to him, it sometimes costs a company three times more to get rid of a worker than it did to get rid of a manager.