By Syed Mubashir Shah
A child in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa does not begin his journey towards unemployment on the day he receives his degree. It begins much earlier.
It begins in a classroom where the roof may be intact but the resources are not. It begins when a student learns to reproduce a textbook instead of question it. It begins when a school teaches children how to pass an examination but not necessarily how to write, communicate, use technology or solve a problem they have never seen before.
By the time that child walks across a university stage, holding a degree that his family may have sacrificed years of income to finance, the important question is no longer simply whether he is educated. It is whether the economy has any use for what he has been educated to do.
That is where Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s education crisis becomes an employment crisis.
The numbers are difficult to ignore.
Pakistan’s latest Household Integrated Economic Survey puts KP’s literacy rate at 58 percent among people aged 10 and above. The province has made progress: its share of children aged 5 to 16 who are out of school fell from 31 percent to 28 percent between 2018-19 and 2024-25. But that still means more than one in four children in that age group is outside the education system. The situation is particularly difficult for girls: 37 percent of girls aged 5 to 16 in KP are out of school, compared with 20 percent of boys.
There is another problem hiding behind enrollment figures.
A child can be inside a school and still not receive a meaningful education.
Pakistan Education Statistics 2023-24 recorded 58.3 million students and 2.66 million teachers across the country’s education system. Yet only 47 percent of public schools had all five basic facilities: electricity, drinking water, toilets, boundary walls and satisfactory buildings. Twenty-four percent of public primary schools were operating with only one teacher. KP actually performed better than the national average on the five-facility measure, with 64 percent of its public schools meeting the benchmark, but that still leaves a substantial number without the basics.
This matters because education is not simply about getting a child through the school gate. It is about what happens after he enters.
A student can spend twelve years in classrooms and still emerge without the skills required to function confidently in a modern workplace. A high examination score can tell us that a student has mastered the examination system. It does not necessarily tell us whether he can write a professional email, communicate an idea clearly, use digital tools or solve a problem that is not already printed in a textbook.
That is the uncomfortable gap between education and learning.
And then comes university.
Consider the University of Peshawar, once one of the intellectual centres of the region. In 2025, reports said its semester fee had risen from around Rs. 42,000 to Rs. 62,000, while the university was simultaneously facing a serious admissions crisis.
The problem became impossible to ignore when the university discontinued nine BS programmes for Fall 2025 because they failed to attract the required number of students. One programme received only one applicant. Several received two. Others received three, five, seven or fourteen.
This is not simply about unpopular academic subjects. It raises a larger question: what are students being asked to pay for, and what do they believe that degree will do for them afterwards?
When families are struggling to pay university fees, they naturally begin asking whether four years of education will actually improve their child’s chances of finding work.
And this is where the education system meets the labour market.
The latest Labour Force Survey gives KP the country’s highest unemployment rate: 9.6 percent, compared with 7.1 percent nationally.
More troubling is the position of graduates. Recent analysis of the same labour data found that people with university qualifications make up 14.8 percent of the unemployed but only 8.9 percent of the employed. In other words, having a degree does not automatically protect a young Pakistani from unemployment.
This is the paradox we have created.
We tell young people: go to school.
Then: get good marks.
Then: get a degree.
Then they do exactly what we told them to do.
And we tell them: you don’t have enough experience.
Where were they supposed to get it?
A fresh graduate is expected to have experience before anyone gives him his first serious opportunity. The result is an employment market where internships increasingly become the bridge between education and employment, but that bridge is not equally accessible to everyone.
A student from a wealthy family can afford to spend six months working for little or no money in Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi.
A student whose father is a daily-wage worker cannot.
For him, an unpaid internship is not an opportunity. It is an expense.
And that creates another inequality.
The child who was already better educated gets another advantage after graduation: he can afford to work for free long enough to gain the experience that employers demand. The child who needs an income immediately is pushed further behind.
This is how inequality reproduces itself without anyone formally announcing it.
It is why we should stop treating unemployment as a personal failure.
There is a certain cruelty in telling a young person that he simply did not work hard enough when the system around him gave him a weak school, an expensive university, limited practical training and an employment market demanding experience before offering an opportunity.
Of course, individual responsibility matters. But so does institutional responsibility.
And teachers should not be turned into convenient villains either.
A teacher working inside a broken system cannot be expected to repair the entire system alone. Teachers need training, resources, functioning institutions and, just as importantly, timely salaries and professional respect.
If we want teachers to prepare students for a changing economy, then teacher training itself has to change.
The curriculum must change with it.
We need less obsession with reproducing paragraphs from textbooks and more emphasis on writing, digital literacy, communication, critical thinking, problem-solving and practical skills.
A student should not have to wait until university graduation to discover what a CV looks like, how a professional email is written or how an interview works. These should be part of education long before the student enters the labour market.
There is also a larger problem with higher education itself.
Private higher education in KP is not unregulated; the province has a Higher Education Regulatory Authority, or HERA, which is responsible for registration, oversight and quality regulation of private-sector higher education institutions. The problem, therefore, is not the absence of a regulator. The real question is whether regulation is strong enough to ensure affordability, quality and accountability.
That distinction matters.
Good journalism should not accuse institutions of having no regulation when regulation exists. It should ask whether the regulation is actually working.
The same principle applies to government budgets.
The solution is not simply to announce another school, another university or another education package. We have to ask what happens after the announcement.
Does the classroom have a teacher?
Does the teacher have the training to teach?
Does the school have water and electricity?
Does the student acquire usable skills?
Does the university degree correspond to the labour market?
And, after graduation, is there an actual door waiting to be opened?
Three changes would make a meaningful difference.
First, make education affordable and accountable. Public universities need sustainable financing so that financial pressure does not simply get transferred to students through rising fees. Private institutions should face meaningful oversight of fees, quality and academic standards through existing regulatory mechanisms.
Second, rebuild the curriculum around skills rather than marks. English and Urdu communication, digital literacy, writing, critical thinking, problem-solving and career preparation should not be treated as optional extras. They should be part of what it means to be educated.
Third, fix the transition from education to employment. Internships should have clear learning objectives, supervision and a minimum stipend where students are performing productive work. Companies should not be allowed to use “internship” as a convenient label for permanent unpaid labour. Government and universities should also build stronger links between students and employers before graduation, not after.
None of this is impossible.
KP’s young people are not short of intelligence. They are not short of ambition. And they certainly are not short of dreams.
What they are short of is a system that connects those dreams to opportunity.
The tragedy is that we keep measuring the wrong things.
We celebrate the number of students enrolled. We celebrate examination percentages. We celebrate the number of degrees awarded.
But perhaps the most important question is much simpler:
What happened to that student after graduation?
Did he find meaningful work? Did she find a career? Did their education actually improve their lives?
Or did they simply receive a piece of paper telling them they were qualified, and then spend the next several years trying to convince someone to give them a chance?
That is the degree trap.
And until Khyber Pakhtunkhwa builds a real bridge between education, skills and employment, we will continue producing graduates who did everything we asked of them and still have nowhere to go.
