‘Original’ degrees and unemployment


July 15, 2010

RAWALPINDI: Gone are the days when an undergraduate degree meant job security. Nowadays, there are hundreds of unemployed graduates scouring newspapers for job ads and going from pillar to post in search of a decent job. As a matter of fact, a decent job now implies any odd job that gives one a feeling of being employed. Engineers have switched over from technical jobs to lowly paid ones that employ neither their skills nor their practical expertise. Doctors have to face a similar fate once they pass through the rigours of medical school and face the harsh realities of the world outside.

Discontentment with our educational system or perhaps the desire for luxuries forces most of our elite to send children abroad for education. And now, the recent prognosis by Law Minister Babar Awan about Bilawal Bhutto being next in the line to inherit the prime minister’s office suggests that a new generation, born and bred abroad will take over the reins of a country it knows little about. Our class-centric education system requires complete over-hauling if we want to see the likes of scientists and technocrats emerge from it. But with the degrees of our ruling elite under scrutiny, this seems like a Herculean task for the current administration of fake degree holders. The least they can do is to show mercy for jobless graduates with original degrees and devise policies for their employment immediately.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16th, 2010.

COMMENTS (1)

faizan khalid | 13 years ago | Reply Reply, What you have said is 100 percent true and shows that you are feeling for the nation, At least for the engineers and doctors- the two most conventional and professional occupation in pakistan. We must be aware of the facts that we facing today, as you have mentioned. But this doesn't mean that after obtaining Bachelors degree we consider it futile. If that degree can do no wonders for us, but it must be considered as a beginning of our profeesional career, or at least that degree is a thing that we can acquire education in abroad-The same thing Bilawal bhutto is doing. Secondly i don't thing that a doctor or engineer must be compared with Bilawal.Bilawal is not an ideal for youth to be compared with him. If he is getting education from Oxford or other University, then he must do it. We don't have concern over it. If he belongs to a family in which he will virtually be a 'politician celebrity' then look at the other side of the picture, he has lost his mother, uncles and other family members, facing still a danger to his life-and in my opinion this is also a factor in his studying in UK,and last but not least they DON'T HAVE reigns of pakistani people. Pakistani people do hold their own reigns in their own hand-Individually they can prosper, can have best possible health and education services in pakistan, and collectively they gonna prove that they do hold their own reign. I close this comment on last note of philosophy: A person can have as much control over you, only that much that you allow him to have control over you.
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