The determinants of graduates’ career success fall into two categories: those factors under the influence of the higher education institutions; and those factors external to the higher education institutions. These determinants provide an explanatory value to the employability and education-job match (i.e. horizontal and vertical) problems that we identify for cohorts of political science graduates in Slovenia over a period of the last two decades on the basis of official labour market records and survey data. We examine both clusters of determinants (internal and external to HE institutions) in the period since the creation of political science as a study programme in Slovenia in 1961, taking into account the programmes’ characteristics and their adaptations to the world of work, enrolment statistics, cooperation with potential employers, state-profession relations, the associational activity and power of the professions, as well as the important macro determinants of the country’s democratisation and political independent, as well as the Europeanisation processes and economic cycles. We argue that the main drivers of the current ill-fortunes of political science graduates in the labour market are not only economic cycles or processes induced by the international environment (e.g. globalisation, trends of re-nationalisation, Europeanisation – Bologna reform), but also the lack of self-regulation and self-control of the profession.