The more the education, the higher the unemployment. Such a comment is very likely to draw mordant criticism. But the truth of the grim status of the job market woes in Bangladesh has been depicted in a report run by a local English Daily on Saturday.
In reality the country is facing mammoth unemployment. The rate of unemployment among persons with education of up to tertiary level is increasing year on year. Across Bangladesh, a crisis of educated unemployment is fast becoming one of the nation’s most pressing social and economic challenges. A generation of graduates or master’s degree holders for whom a university degree has become, as though, a ticket to a waiting room and not a career.
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in its latest Labour Force Survey said one in every three unemployed Bangladeshis today is a graduate. That is nearly 9,00,000 jobless degree-holders. The trajectory is even more worrying. The graduates cross the academic threshold, the fewer jobs there are waiting for them. According to another report, around 35 percent of National University graduates remain unemployed even at age 30, when the doors of both public and private jobs start closing for good for them.
The University Grants Commission warned in 2022 that more than 7,00,000 graduates are entering the labour market each year. Six in ten come from National University affiliated colleges, notorious for weak teaching standards and outdated curricula. Under a normal business and investment—friendly environment, the country can absorb only 3,00,000 graduates a year. Investments, both local and foreign, are the drivers of employment generation, but Bangladesh economy with low and slow investment is too small to absorb the massive youth force. After the wrap-up of the final stage of their education a great many youths with graduation or post-graduation degree desperately try to land a job. But they are soon caught up in the morass of despair as jobs are something rare to find. In the ruthless competition youths fail to procure jobs and become a burden on their families, most of which lead a hard-scrabble existence with pecuniary difficulties. Every year youths with higher education join the jobless queues, because the number of youths and the number of vacancies mismatch. Moreover, the real hurdle lies in the mismatch between what universities produce and what employers need. The question is no longer whether we have enough graduates, but whether our varsities can produce the kind of human capital the economy desperately needs.
And then again, there is a paradox. We cannot meet job market demand, because of a serious skills mismatch. People say there are not enough jobs whereas the employers ask where are the people for hire? These two opposite views show that the quality of education from existing system does not match the requirements of the job market. That’s why local employers continue to hire skilled manpower from abroad.
We have, therefore, to get rid of the traditional horse and buggy system of education and to build a system based on the needs of various sectors of our economy. More people with technical and vocational education are the prime necessity. If we can align our education system based on technical skill with job market demand, unemployment will surely shrink.
