Degrees, dreams and the digital hustle

KARACHI:

Around 15, something shifts in a Pakistani household. Until then, a child is just “in school.” After that, every conversation starts with one familiar question: “Beta, agay kya socha hai?” The child is expected to be serious and make a career choice. Doctor, engineer, CSS. Parents start looking at their child less as a kid and more as a future “settled” person.

For years, the script was straightforward and even predictable. Middle-class parents dreamt of a son in a white coat or a daughter with “Engineer” before her name on LinkedIn. They would sit with calculators, university prospectuses, and relatives’ opinions, trying to solve an impossible equation: Which degree will make my child respected, employed, and financially secure, with the least damage to our bank account? Government vs private, Karachi vs hometown, hostel rent vs reputation. It wasn’t just a career choice; it was a family project.

That project demanded considerable investment. Extra coaching, entry test academies, borrowed money, younger siblings moved from private to cheaper schools so the “doctor-to-be” could continue. The belief was firm: if we somehow survive these years, fees, books, late-night studying, everything will settle. “Bas degree ho jaye, phir dekhna.”

But if you walk into a college cafeteria today and ask a class of 16- or 17-year-olds what they really want to be, the answers sound different. Yes, some still say doctor or civil servant. Many don’t. You hear: “content creator,” “gamer,” “freelancer,” “Amazon business,” “AI ka kuch scene.” Sometimes they say it as a joke, testing the reaction. Sometimes they mean it.

It’s not that conventional professions have disappeared. Hospitals are still there, offices are still full, but the centre of attention has shifted. The limelight, the visible, loud, colourful part of “success”, is online now. A boy from a small town uploads a funny video from his phone and wakes up to a hundred thousand views. A girl from a two-room flat in Rawalpindi does makeup tutorials on TikTok and suddenly brands are sending her PR packages. A freelancer in Sialkot shares a screenshot of his first $1,000 month on Upwork. This is what a 15-year-old is scrolling through at night, headphones on, while their parents in the next room discuss which engineering university has “better scope.”

And there’s something else that is changing: the way young people think about employment itself. Not everyone wants that fixed 9-to-5, the same chair, the same boss, the same salary no matter how much effort they put in. They like the idea that if they take one more project, one more client, one more stream, they’ll see the money increase directly. The more you work, the more you earn – simple, at least in theory. No waiting for annual increments, office politics, and HR approvals.

Of course, it’s not only about money. There’s the thrill of being seen. One viral clip, one trending audio, and your name is suddenly in strangers’ phones from Karachi to Kohat. For a generation raised on likes and comments, that visibility feels like proof that you’re doing something right. Fame used to belong to actors, singers, and cricket stars. Now a gamer with a half-decent PC and good internet can have a bigger audience than a local TV show.

To many students, the digital path looks like a shortcut: less fee, less time, somehow more return. No four-year degree, no entrance test drama, no hostels. Just a smartphone, a laptop if you’re lucky, and an internet connection. Compared to the long, expensive road to MBBS or engineering, where even after graduating you may end up jobless or underpaid, the online world looks strangely efficient.

But underneath the glamour and screenshots, there is a different kind of uncertainty. Algorithms change without warning. Views drop. Clients disappear. Payments get stuck. You can go from feeling “set” to completely lost in a few months. The old careers no longer guarantee stability, but the new ones don’t promise it either. They just promise something else: a chance. A chance to try on your own terms, from your own room, without waiting for some HR department to select your CV from a pile.

Somewhere between that anxious 15-year-old filling out pre-medical forms and the same teenager secretly planning a YouTube channel, a quiet tug-of-war is happening. Between the degrees their parents still trust and the digital careers that feel closer, quicker, more in reach. The question is no longer just “doctor banoge ya engineer?” It’s whether chasing views, clients, and followers can really replace the old dream of a stable, respectable job? Or whether Pakistan’s young people are simply trading one kind of risk for another.

Shifting goals

The students who grew up watching those Upwork screenshots and TikTok success stories are now sitting in university lecture halls. And the interesting thing is, the dream has not been replaced so much as it has been complicated.

Some still want the white coat. Some are still grinding through FSc, repeating entry tests, paying academy fees their families can barely manage. But even among those students, something has silently shifted in how they think about what comes after. The degree is still there. The certainty that used to come with it, less so.

Hassan Nadeem, a 22-year-old business student at a private university in Karachi says he started university with a fairly standard plan. Finish the degree, find a corporate job, work his way up. Somewhere along the way that plan started feeling insufficient. Not wrong exactly, just thin. "Earlier I thought of going into a corporate job after BBA," he says, "But now I feel having something of your own gives more growth and freedom." He still has not abandoned the corporate route entirely. But he is building something on the side, keeping options open, thinking in ways his father probably did not have to at 22.

And it is not just him. Spend time around university students in Karachi, Lahore, Hyderabad, and you start hearing variations of the same thing. A degree running in the background, and something else being built quietly alongside it. A freelancing profile. A small YouTube channel. A Fiverr account with two or three completed orders. Nothing dramatic, just hedging.

Dr Nosheen Raza, Assistant Professor and Students’ Advisor at the University of Karachi, says this balancing act has become increasingly common among students. “Ten years ago, students wanted one safe job for life, in a bank, government, or big company,” she says. “Now, even good students find it difficult to get a job. They still get a degree as a backup plan. But their real focus is on building a YouTube channel, learning AI tools, or freelancing online.”

Faseeh Afzal, a 24-year-old engineering student from Hyderabad says what many others seem to feel but do not always say directly. "Earlier one degree was enough to build a career. Today students feel they need multiple skills and backup options," he said, adding that he is not angry about it. It is more like he looked at what happened to the batch before him and quietly adjusted his plans. The evidence he is looking at is real. Graduates sitting at home months after finishing expensive degrees. Friends with good GPAs sending out CVs that go nowhere. The engineering student puts it directly, "You see graduates struggling for jobs while freelancers and creators are earning independently." He is not dismissing his own degree. He is just not willing to bet everything on it.

Part of what has genuinely changed is exposure. A 26-year-old media sciences student from Lahore makes this point in a way that is hard to argue with. "Earlier people only knew about a few professions," she says. "Social media has changed exposure completely." The child of a government employee in Faisalabad and the child of a doctor in a DHA neighbourhood are now watching the same YouTube channels, scrolling the same feeds, seeing the same twenty-three-year-old from somewhere in Punjab share a screenshot of his first six-figure freelancing month. The range of what feels imaginable has widened in a way that no previous generation experienced quite like this.

Along with that comes a different idea of what a good working life actually looks like. Flexibility gets mentioned a lot. So does not wanting to be stuck answering to one employer for a fixed salary that does not move no matter how hard you work. A 27-year-old architecture graduate from Lahore who wants to go into AI and digital product development says success for him means financial stability alongside freedom and work-life balance. "Earlier people focused more on secure professions," he says. "Today students think more about opportunities, lifestyle, flexibility, and global exposure." He is not being dreamy about it. He grew up watching his parents' generation trade large portions of their lives for job security that sometimes held and sometimes did not. He wants the stability, just not necessarily the trade-off that used to come attached to it.

But sit with these students long enough and the conversation moves past aspirations into something more uncomfortable. It is not just that they want different things. It is that many of them have done a kind of informal audit of the paths their parents trusted, and the results are not encouraging. Nadeem says it without any particular emotion, "A lot of graduates are unemployed or underpaid even after expensive degrees. I have seen it in my own extended family. A cousin with an engineering degree doing nothing related to engineering. A neighbour's son with an MBA who spent fourteen months sending out CVs before settling for something well below what the degree was supposed to unlock.”

This brings the question back to the degrees themselves. To what they cost, how long they take, and whether the return still justifies the investment in the way it once so reliably did.

The cost of conventional success

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that Pakistani middle-class families know well. It sets in somewhere around the third year of an expensive degree, when the fees have already been paid, the younger siblings have already adjusted to a cheaper school, and everyone is quietly holding their breath waiting for the other side of this investment to arrive.

The plan was always simple in theory. Survive the years, get the degree, and stability follows. For a long time, that is more or less what happened. It is happening less reliably now.

Take Ameen Shakil, a 29-year-old engineer who went through the full process. Entry test prep, four years of degree, then the job market. He says what a lot of engineers his age will admit if you ask them directly, "At one point it was considered one of the safest professions, but today many engineers struggle with underemployment or salaries that don't match expectations." He works in his field, which already puts him ahead of many classmates. But the version of engineering life he was sold during university and the one he actually landed in are not quite the same thing.

Medicine is its own conversation. Alishba, a 31-year-old doctor, is clear-eyed about what the road involves in ways that people outside it rarely are. Six years minimum, then internship, then specialisation, all while remaining financially dependent on family well into your late twenties. "People underestimate the emotional, financial, and physical exhaustion behind it," she says, adding that she chose medicine and stayed in it. But she also gets why a 16-year-old today might pause before filling out that pre-medical form.

Degrees without guarantees

The frustration that engineers and doctors describe in private is not just personal. It points to something that economists and labour researchers have been watching build quietly for years.

Dr. Muhammad Jehangir Khan, Director of the Center for Sustainable Futures at PIDE in Islamabad, has looked at the numbers closely. "Graduate unemployment is nearly three times the national average unemployment rate," he says. Tens of thousands earn postgraduate degrees each year in fields once considered safe bets, and walk into a job market that has run out of room for them. By 2024-25, youth unemployment had climbed to 5.9 million, up from 4.5 million just four years earlier. Around 32.5 percent of young Pakistanis between 15 and 29 are classified as NEET, not in education, employment, or training. "When a degree stops being a promise," Dr. Khan says, "trust in the system erodes naturally."

What makes this harder to fix is that the problem is not just about quantity of jobs. It is about fit. Pakistan does not have enough high-tech companies, advanced manufacturing setups, or research-driven industries that can actually absorb the engineers, scientists, and IT graduates its universities keep producing. A lot of them end up in work that has nothing to do with what they studied, or they leave the country. "There is a high disparity between what universities offer and what the economy actually needs," Dr. Khan says. University-industry linkages are weak. The degree and the job market are essentially having two separate conversations.

The gig economy figures show where some of that frustration is going. Pakistan's Labour Force Survey 2024-25 found 2.9 percent of people working full-time in gig work, with another 10.6 percent doing it on the side, and 75 percent of that group is under 35. Freelancing earnings are approaching one billion dollars annually. But Dr. Khan is careful about how this gets read. "In Pakistan’s case, it’s largely necessity wearing the clothes of aspiration."

Genuine ambition exists, he says, but it is tangled up with economic pressure in ways that are hard to separate. And structurally, the foundation remains shaky. Payment gateways unreliable, electricity costs high, digital infrastructure outside major cities still inconsistent. "Not yet," is how he answers the question of whether Pakistan is ready for a generation building livelihoods this way.

There is a particular moment that Hamza Bhatti, a Pakistani content creator, describes when talking about what this path actually involves. "It changed everything," he says, "Not always in the ways people romanticize." He is not being modest. He means it literally. "Professionally, I went from being someone who made videos to someone who runs a business."

That gap between perception and reality is exactly where the conversation about digital careers in Pakistan gets interesting.

For young people scrolling through their feeds, the appeal is obvious enough. Someone their age, from a city they recognise, working with brands, building an audience, setting their own hours. "Visibility creates possibility," Bhatti says. "When a kid in Rawalpindi sees someone from his city working with multinational brands, traveling, and building something real, it cracks open a ceiling he didn't even know was there." Social media has made success feel closer and more achievable than a decade of conventional career-building ever did. That is genuinely powerful.

But Bhatti is careful about what that visibility actually shows. "What's visible is the outcome, not the process," he says. "They see the brand deal announcement, not the eighteen months of unpaid content before it." Behind the reels and thumbnails is something most young people do not fully account for. "They see the reel. They don't see the twelve drafts before it," says Bhatti.

Brand contracts fall through. Income disappears without warning. Algorithms shift. "This path gave me freedom, but freedom without structure is just chaos." It is a small business with all the pressure that involves, just without a boss to absorb any of it. "The ones who last aren't the most talented. They're the most operationally serious."

On the question of degrees, his answer is more nuanced than the usual either-or debate. "A degree doesn't make you a better creator. But it might make you a sharper one." He has sat across boardroom tables from multinational clients where understanding strategy, ROI, and audience data made the difference between closing a deal and losing it.

That knowledge does not have to come from a university, he says, but it has to come from somewhere. "Don't chase a degree because it's expected. And don't skip it just to look rebellious. Ask honestly what knowledge you need to build something serious. Then go get it, whatever the format."

He does encourage young people to pursue it seriously, but with a condition attached. "Treat it like a profession from day one, not a fallback." Because the ones who come in chasing a lifestyle rather than committing to a craft tend not to last. "This path will test you in ways a 9-to-5 never will."

None of this has slowed the interest. Digital careers are no longer being whispered about as backup plans. For a growing number of young Pakistanis, they are the plan. Which raises a quieter question underneath all of it: what does success actually mean to this generation, and has that definition already changed in ways most people have not caught up to yet.

Ask young Pakistanis today what success looks like and the answers sound different from what their parents would have said. Not completely different. Financial stability still comes up every time. Supporting the family still matters. But the shape around those things has changed.

"Success means financial independence, peace of mind, and having control over your own time," says Nadeem, the BBA student from Karachi. Faseeh, the engineering student from Hyderabad, says it more simply, "Not depending on anyone financially and being able to support your family comfortably."

These are not radical ideas. Every generation has wanted roughly the same thing. What is different is what they are no longer willing to attach to it. The fixed hours. The single employer. The decades of patience before anything resembling freedom arrives.

The media sciences student from Lahore puts it in a way that captures something real. "Success means doing work you enjoy while being financially secure and mentally satisfied," she said. Mental satisfaction is new language in this conversation. It would have sounded almost indulgent to an older generation that largely understood work as something you endured in exchange for security. That trade-off is being quietly renegotiated.

Dr Nosheen says the definition of success among students has visibly shifted over the years. “Ten years ago, students wanted one safe job for life, in a bank, government, or big company,” she says. “Today’s young people define success as having control over their time, doing creative work, earning good while living in a smaller Pakistani city, and not having to obey a boss in an office.”

Social media is part of what changed the terms. Growing up watching creators build audiences and freelancers work from their own rooms, a generation absorbed a different picture of what a working life could look like. Bhatti's observation that "visibility creates possibility" applies here too. When success is visible and apparently achievable without a traditional career path, it reshapes what people decide to aim for.

But Dr Nosheen says this shift also comes with a different kind of pressure. “There is no clear road map anymore,” she says. “You have to manage everything yourself.”

None of this means the old markers have disappeared. A stable income still matters enormously. But sitting alongside that now is something harder to measure: autonomy, creative satisfaction, the ability to decide how your own day runs.

The question is who actually gets to chase that. Because the digital ambitions visible on every feed are not equally available to everyone. Geography, infrastructure, and access quietly determine who can even enter this conversation.

Unequal access

The students in this story are mostly from Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad. That is not a coincidence. It is part of the point.

Digital careers need things that are not evenly distributed in Pakistan. A laptop that works. Internet that does not cut out every few hours. Some comfort with English. Basic familiarity with platforms that students in larger cities absorb almost without trying. For a student at a private university in Karachi, opening a Fiverr account or starting a YouTube channel is inconvenient at worst. For someone in a small town in interior Sindh or southern Punjab, where load-shedding stretches through the day and mobile data is the only internet available, it is a different situation entirely.

A teenager in Dera Ghazi Khan and one in Gulshan-e-Iqbal might be watching the same creator, following the same freelancing page, saving the same motivational reel. The phone screen looks identical. What sits behind it does not.

Dr Nosheen says technology is quietly creating a new kind of divide among young people. “Some young people have good internet, digital skills, and English. They can work for clients around the world,” she says. “But other young people do not have these things. So now there is a new kind of difference between young people, those who can reach the global online market, and those who cannot.”

One has a stable connection, a family member who knows what Upwork is, maybe a laptop shared between two siblings. The other is working off mobile data that runs out, in a house where nobody has done this before, with no one nearby to ask.

Digital platforms have let some people in from places nobody expected, and those stories matter. But they get talked about precisely because they are rare. For every person who made it work from a small town with a secondhand phone, there are many more who hit walls that had nothing to do with talent or effort. Building something sustainable is a different problem from just getting started.

The success stories from smaller towns matter precisely because they remain exceptions. Access still shapes ambition long before talent gets the chance to.

Is the gig economy sustainable?

The income is real. The flexibility is real. But so is the month where a client disappears without paying, the brand deal that falls through two days before closing, the algorithm update that cuts your views in half and takes months to recover from.

Bhatti has lived enough of this to speak plainly. "The creator economy is real. The money is real, the influence is real. But it operates like a small business, not a lucky break." The finished work that goes out understates what went into it. "They see the brand deal announcement, not the eighteen months of unpaid content before it."

Freelancing has its own version of the same problem. More Pakistanis are on Upwork and Fiverr than ever, which means more competition for the same clients. Rates get undercut. Profiles take months to build. There is no sick leave, no pension, nothing to fall back on when things go quiet. "This path will test you in ways a 9-to-5 never will."

Dr. Khan's structural picture does not make it easier. Payment gateways remain unreliable. Digital infrastructure outside major cities is patchy. Gig workers have no meaningful social protection. A generation is building livelihoods on platforms it does not control, inside an economy that has not worked out how to support them properly.

None of this makes gig work the wrong choice. For many young Pakistanis it is a genuinely viable path. But sustainable is a different word from possible. And that difference matters when you are trying to build something that outlasts the next algorithm update.

Which brings the conversation back to where it started. A generation trying to figure out, with whatever tools are available, what a working life should actually look like now.

A different kind of settled

The question "beta, agay kya socha hai" has not gone away. It still gets asked at chai tables and family gatherings, by aunts and uncles and parents who genuinely want to know their child will be okay. What has changed is how hard it has become to answer simply.

An earlier generation had a ready response. Doctor. Engineer. Government job. The words carried weight because the path behind them was legible. You knew what it cost, roughly how long it took, and what waited at the other end.

That legibility has faded. Not because young people are lost, but because the map itself has changed. The careers their parents trusted are still there, still respected, still pursued by thousands. But the guarantee that once came attached to them has quietly loosened. And alongside those paths, an entirely different set of possibilities has opened up, noisier, more visible, less certain in different ways.

What this generation wants is not really so different from what came before. Financial security. Family support. A life that feels like it belongs to them. As Dr Nosheen Raza puts it, “There is no clear road map anymore.” Young people are trying to build careers in a moment where both the old certainties and the new possibilities come with their own risks. The difference is in how they are trying to get there, and how much they are willing to question the old routes to find out.