Pakistan’s universities produce credentials for roles that no longer exist or are increasingly disassociated from the labour market. A quick glance at the latest Labour Force Survey reveals the scale of the problem. Unemployment currently stands at 7.1 per cent, leaving 5.9 million people out of work. Among those aged 15 to 24, the rate rises to 12.8pc. More than 28pc of young Pakistanis are neither in employment, education nor training, while among young women the figure exceeds 45pc. Under the new international definition, 80.8pc of all employment is informal.
Pakistan has 278 universities, while the Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) FY26 snapshot puts total higher-education enrolment, including digital learning, at almost 2.4m. These students are spread across different years and programmes, with roughly half a million completing their degrees annually. Yet neither the HEC, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS_ nor the universities collectively can answer one elementary question: what happened to last year’s graduating class? This is a classic case of selective disclosure, where institutions reveal what flatters them and withhold what might expose them to scrutiny.
The limited capacity of public universities to publish detailed placement data is understandable. For the country’s elite universities, however, it is harder to explain. Visit the websites of Pakistan’s leading universities, and you will find career fairs, employer logos and celebrated alums, but rarely the denominator behind their claims. Leading universities claim placement but do not publish response rates, median salaries or separate undergraduate outcomes.
The consequences fall most heavily on households. In a post-Covid economy, a family may spend Rs6-7m on an elite MBA, only to watch the graduate struggle for months before receiving offers below Rs150,000. The salary may be respectable in isolation, but it bears little relationship to the cost, expectations and implied return through which the qualification was marketed. When universities celebrate exceptional alumni while remaining silent about the average graduate, selective disclosure begins to resemble mis-selling.
The deeper problem is that the promised bridge from education to employment leads into an economy that cannot absorb the number of people trying to cross it. Roughly 3.5m Pakistanis join the labour force every year. Total employment has recently grown by about 3.1m annually, yet formal non-agricultural employment has expanded by only about 700,000 a year. That figure spans every education level, age and occupation. The graduate-appropriate share remains unknown because Pakistan conducts no national job-vacancy survey.
Universities should publish detailed placement data about their graudates
For one of the world’s most populous and youthful countries, it is striking that the state remains the most coveted employer. Between 2016 and 2025, nearly 143,000 candidates sat the CSS written examination; roughly 2,200 were recommended, about one in 64. In 2025 alone, 12,792 candidates appeared, while only 170 received allocations.
The pressure extends far beyond CSS-related posts. In 2023, the Federal Public Service Commission received more than 436,000 applications for just 2,359 newly advertised posts. The state attracts an immense queue of educated young people, yet has neither the fiscal space nor the institutional capacity to absorb more than a fraction of them.
More ironic still, unemployment in Pakistan rises with educational attainment. Degree holders face an unemployment rate of 10.9pc, compared with 4.7pc among those with no education. For university-educated women participating in the labour market, the rate reaches around 24pc, more than three times that faced by similarly qualified men. Pakistan educates women into expectation and then denies many of them the opportunity to participate.
A reader may reasonably ask where this unemployment pressure eventually goes. Increasingly, the answer lies at the airport. More than 760,000 Pakistanis registered for overseas employment in 2025. Families finance education and training, foreign economies capture part of the resulting productivity, and Pakistan receives only a fraction of that value back through remittances. For the household, migration may be entirely rational. For the republic, however, it amounts to a referendum on domestic opportunity, and the verdict stings.
Honesty begins with disclosure. The HEC should require every degree programme to publish an audited report stating the size of its graduating class, survey response rate, employment after six and twelve months, median salary and quartiles, the share working in related fields, and differences by qualification level, gender and region. Undergraduate outcomes should be reported separately.
The immediate effect would be healthier competition between universities. Once opacity gives way to disclosure, families would gain something they currently lack: informed consent. Before committing years of a student’s life and millions of rupees, they would be able to compare how previous cohorts performed. Universities would then compete on outcomes rather than reputation alone.
Another urgent step is the establishment of a national council on education, skills and employment, bringing the government, the HEC, the PBS, universities, employers, technology companies, financiers and entrepreneurs to the same table. Each holds information the others lack. Their continued separation leaves students to bear the cost of institutional blindness.
The council should set the supply of qualifications against the demand for skills, supported by a national job-vacancy survey. Pakistan could then see the mismatch by discipline, industry and district. Programmes producing persistent unemployment should face lower enrolment, redesigned curricula or closure, while fields facing shortages should receive additional support.
The public deserves the denominator. Pakistan’s young people deserve an education system prepared to act on what that denominator reveals.
The writer is an economist and educationist based in Lahore.
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 27th, 2026