Educated young Pakistani experience a distinct form of humiliation. After spending years in university, completing a degree and preparing a polished CV, you step into the job market— just to discover that you lack experience. For a role supposedly “entry-level”. The harshness at the core of that logic is rarely called out loud, yet all fresh graduates in this country are familiar with it.
Around 800,000 students graduate from Pakistani universities every year. The economy is able to absorb only a limited share of them. The gap is the result of systemic design, it reflects the structure of a system that failed to evolve alongside the education it expanded.
For a long period, a bachelor’s degree held strong value. It functioned as a signal and a promise, offering a reasonable investment in your future. This no longer holds true. Today, a degree marks only the beginning of a prolonged and more uncertain process. According to PIDE research, over 31% of Pakistani graduates continue to face unemployment, with postgraduate degree holders facing some of the worst outcomes.
What has shifted is not ambition, but the market around it. The market now seeks graduates who come prepared with applied skills, digital fluency, and real-world experience. At the same time, universities remain tied to study programs built for the past decade. This leaves a 64% skills gap between graduate competencies and hiring demands.
Skills mismatches by themselves fail to explain the whole situation. In Pakistan, connections still matter more than competence. Across both private and public sectors, hiring decisions are often driven by nepotism and favouritism. For young people lacking networks, who did not move in the right social circles or come from elite educational backgrounds, the path forward is not narrow but tightly controlled.
This is the section of the discussion we tend to avoid. Policy documents address skill development, while seminars emphasize entrepreneurship. What often goes unsaid is that meritocracy cannot operate where connections matter more than merit.
Unable to secure formal employment, millions of young Pakistanis are pushed into gig work and informal sector out of necessity rather than preference. In Pakistan, over 72% of non-agricultural workforce fall within the informal economy. No formal agreements. No benefits. No opportunity to advance. Meanwhile, gig platforms sell independence, but the cost is the loss of basic labor
protections that traditional employment once guaranteed. This is not a career path but a temporary holding phase. And it turned into permanence for many young people.
When the structure fails to give people anything worth holding onto, exit becomes a rational response. In 2024–25 alone, more than 727,000 citizens of Pakistan left the country for employment abroad. Close to two-thirds of young Pakistanis indicate they would emigrate if the chance arose. Included among them are doctors, engineers, and IT professionals — the very talent the country cannot afford to lose and neglects most thoroughly.
Pakistan gains financially through remittances under this arrangement. But the real loss is far more costly: it is the loss of citizens, their intellect, tax income, years of potential contribution. The yearly financial impact of this human capital loss is calculated at $4.2 billion. No amount of remittances can balance this loss.
Pakistan’s common answer to graduate unemployment is a quiet demand that young people should put in more effort. Improve your skills, endure longer, expand connections, and settle for any position. This framing shifts the burden onto individuals for what is fundamentally a systemic failure. The disappearance of entry-level jobs has nothing to do with the abilities or qualification of young people — but because the economic structure was never reconstructed to absorb them, the employment system favors connections rather than academic merit, and the state allocated just 1.9% of GDP to the education system intended to lift them. A generation cannot be blamed for a system designed to exclude them.