For decades, education has generally been viewed as an effective instrument for social mobility. Education has always taken different forms in time and space, chasing and pursuing goals and objectives, crossing human societies. Structured around their actors – the apprentice and the master; the student and the teacher; the trainee and the trainer – education as a socially constructed product is influenced by social changes, while its embodiments can influence directly in those mutations. Those changes are thus a consequence of ideological, material and social conditions in which education is produced and the role that society commits it in the construction of the society itself, defining it and giving it its own rationality, structuring and justifying even their existence: education as a form of acquisition, development and transmission of knowledge changes individual and collective thinking and acting, to the service of the development of individuals and societies. In the current “global and totalitarian society” (Ramonet, 1997), characterized by mass production and mass-enjoyment of the results of productive activity, the function of “school” has changed. Today it is expected that the school not only contributes to the development of citizenship but most particularly that “produces” socially useful citizens, i.e. citizens that are able to enter into the labour market and respond to requests that it imposes. Education must produce individuals able to be in a constant state of employability. However, in Portugal, since the late 2010s the situation is the reverse and the country faces an increasing number of university graduates who do not get any recognition by the market and which thickens the ranks of unemployed in the country. Simultaneously, many thousands of higher education graduates, including doctoral ones, seek emigration in the achievement of its objectives: have adequate work to their academic qualification, leading to an exodus of highly skilled labour. Based on official data on unemployment of graduates, including by scientific areas and ages, and the highly skilled emigration, this article questions the employability of different scientific areas of higher education and discuss the educational and economic policies that generate a real brain drain in Portugal in the last decade.