What is the worth of a degree if, after years in classrooms, a graduate’s final destination is an unemployment queue?
For generations in Bangladesh, education has been sold as a ticket to a better tomorrow. Parents sell land, spend savings, borrow money, and sacrifice small comforts so that their children can walk through university gates. A degree hanging on the wall has therefore been more than a certificate; it has been a family’s framed photograph of hope. Yet for too many young Bangladeshis today, graduation is not a gateway to employment. It is the beginning of another examination, an exhausting test of waiting, applying, competing and being rejected.
The numbers make this paradox difficult to dismiss. An article in the September 2026 issue of the IMF’s Finance & Development reports that about 36 percent of Bangladeshi labour-force participants aged 15–24 with post-secondary education are unemployed, compared with roughly 10 percent of young people overall. The precise figures vary according to age group and definition. An IMF country report based on Bangladesh’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2024 puts unemployment among highly educated youth at 25 percent, more than three times that of their less-educated counterparts. But whichever measure we choose, the message remains disturbingly similar: in Bangladesh, more education does not necessarily mean an easier passage into employment.
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ LFS 2024 recorded 26.24 lakh unemployed people, including 8.85 lakh university graduates. It also showed that one in three unemployed university graduates had remained without work for up to two years. Meanwhile, around 86 lakh young Bangladeshis are neither in employment, education, nor training. A demographic dividend can become a demographic debt when millions of young hands have certificates to hold but insufficient meaningful work to do.
Why has Bangladesh reached this uncomfortable crossroads? The answer lies not in one failure but in a chain of them: a widening mismatch between university education and labour-market needs, insufficient creation of high-productivity jobs, an economy inadequately diversified beyond established sectors, weak university-industry connections, deficiencies in practical and digital skills, and a culture that has too often confused credentials with competence. We have expanded classrooms faster than we have expanded destinations.
Bangladesh’s universities produce thousands of graduates every year, but the economy has not transformed quickly enough to absorb their ambitions. The IMF identifies this structural contradiction precisely. Between 2015 and 2024, manufacturing’s share of value added increased by 4.82 percentage points, yet its share of employment declined by 2.2 percentage points. Among young workers, the shift was even more striking: their employment share moved toward agriculture by 19.72 percentage points while falling in manufacturing and services. In other words, economic growth and employment growth do not always follow the same path.
The World Bank provides another sobering picture. Between 2016 and 2022, around 14 million young Bangladeshis reached working age, while only 8.7 million jobs were added. Manufacturing grew substantially during that period, but employment in the sector actually declined. Growth without adequate employment is a tree with impressive branches but too little fruit.
A painful mismatch also exists between what universities teach and what workplaces demand. Employers increasingly seek critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, advanced digital literacy, adaptability, and specialised technical competence. Yet BBS data reported this year show that 42 percent of vocational training remains concentrated on basic computer literacy, even as artificial intelligence, automation and advanced digital technologies reshape workplaces. We cannot prepare tomorrow’s workforce with yesterday’s toolbox. Universities must therefore ask an uncomfortable question: Are we educating students merely to graduate, or educating them to participate meaningfully in a changing economy?
This does not mean turning universities into factories producing employees on an assembly line. Education must still cultivate imagination, citizenship, ethics, critical consciousness, and intellectual freedom. A university that teaches only employability produces workers but not necessarily thinkers. Yet the opposite extreme is equally dangerous. A curriculum disconnected from economic and technological realities may produce knowledge without pathways for applying it. The bridge must be built from both ends.
Universities should establish meaningful partnerships with industries, not ceremonial memoranda that sleep peacefully in filing cabinets. Curricula need regular review with employers, academics, professional bodies and graduates. Structured internships, apprenticeships, research-industry collaboration and career counselling should become integral parts of undergraduate education. Students of every discipline should acquire transferable competencies in communication, digital technology, data literacy, critical thinking and problem-solving.
The economy, however, must do its share. We cannot solve unemployment simply by repeatedly telling graduates to acquire more skills. Skills without jobs merely create better-qualified unemployed people. Bangladesh needs investment and economic diversification that can generate high-productivity employment. The IMF recommends expanding into higher-value industries, attracting more foreign direct investment, improving job-matching systems, strengthening education-industry partnerships, and improving STEM and apprenticeship programs. The World Bank similarly points towards IT services, logistics, agro-processing and stronger small and medium enterprises as potential sources of diversified employment. Entrepreneurship should also become a viable road rather than a slogan printed on seminar banners.
Particular attention must be paid to women. The IMF’s analysis of 2024 LFS data finds unemployment among highly educated women at 16.66 percent, compared with 6.37 percent among highly educated men. Affordable childcare, safe transportation, flexible employment and workplaces free from discrimination are therefore economic necessities, not peripheral social concerns.
Bangladesh has already achieved something remarkable: millions of families now believe deeply in education. That faith must not be betrayed. Our task is not to discourage young people from obtaining degrees, but to restore meaning to those degrees. A certificate should be neither a decorative piece of paper nor a passport to prolonged waiting. It should mark the beginning of possibility.
Bangladesh still possesses its greatest resource, not beneath its soil, but inside its classrooms. If education, industry and economic policy can finally speak the same language, today’s unemployed graduates can become tomorrow’s researchers, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, innovators and creators. A nation should not merely give its young people degrees. It must help create destinations worthy of their dreams.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is an Assistant Professor, English, IUBAT, and DRS, Universiti Putra Malaysia. Email: [email protected]
