A nation of graduates with few jobs for them

A nation of graduates with few jobs for them
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Bangladesh has perfected the art of producing qualified young people for an economy that is increasingly unsure what to do with them. Between graduate unemployment, miserable wages, recruitment favouritism, and an education system selling aspirations on credit, the country’s employment crisis is becoming a particularly expensive national joke. There is a peculiar ritual performed in middle-class Bangladeshi households, wherein a child is sent to the best school the family can afford, enrolled in coaching classes the family cannot afford, instructed to pursue a respectable degree, and eventually presented to society as a finished product. The parents have invested two decades, several small fortunes, and absorbed around 40,000 unsolicited opinions. The graduate has a certificate, a LinkedIn profile, and a growing suspicion that the family’s chauffeur might enjoy greater job security.

Bangladesh’s labour market is where ambition is plentiful, opportunity is rationed and the phrase “we’ll let you know” is the equivalent of parents saying “dekhi”. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, unemployment among university graduates reached 13.54 percent in 2024, compared with 3.66 percent nationally. The International Monetary Fund’s October 2026 assessment paints an uglier picture: nearly 29 percent of highly educated young Bangladeshis are unemployed, while approximately half of highly educated workers occupy jobs beneath their qualifications. Apparently, the more education one acquires, the greater the opportunity to discover how little the economy values it.

Of course, employers have their complaints, such as graduates lacking practical skills, communication abilities, and industry experience. Universities, meanwhile, continue producing degrees with the enthusiasm of a printing press operating without editorial supervision. Employers often demand experience for entry-level positions, universities offer theoretical knowledge with limited practical exposure, and students are left wondering where they were supposed to acquire three years of experience before their first job. But blaming graduates absolves businesses of their reluctance to invest in training, universities of having outdated curricula, and policymakers of their spectacular failure to connect education with economic planning. Everyone identifies a skills gap, but no party seems particularly enthusiastic about closing it.

Then there is the recruitment culture, where meritocracy often shows up dressed for the interview only to discover that someone else’s uncle has already spoken to the managing director. Utilising connections is not unique to Bangladesh, nor is every appointment corrupt. But when recruitment processes lack transparency, personal networks become an alternative method to secure employment. The young person with excellent qualifications but no influential surname is encouraged to develop resilience, presumably because resilience is considerably cheaper than institutional reform. On the other hand, thousands spend their most productive years preparing for competitive government job exams, not necessarily because public administration represents their deepest calling, but because a secure salary and predictable career have become rare luxuries. When the private sector cannot consistently offer stability, fair recruitment, or meaningful progression, the attraction of government service is hardly mysterious.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s celebrated garment industry presents another uncomfortable contradiction. We proudly advertise our manufacturing prowess while workers struggle over wages that must somehow accommodate food, rent, transport, and the occasional extravagance of being alive. Garment workers’ recent protest demanding a Tk 30,000 minimum monthly wage, up from Tk 12,500, has triggered fresh unrest. Manufacturers warn of narrow margins, rising costs, and international competition. These pressures are real, but so is the absurdity of an export economy whose competitiveness remains so dependent on keeping labour inexpensive. The World Bank estimatesthat about 84 percent of workers in Bangladesh operate informally. The IMF has also noted a movementof educated youth towards agriculture rather than higher-productivity manufacturing and services.

Women, naturally, receive an additional complementary obstacle course. Bangladesh has invested enormously in girls’ education, only to maintain a labour market where educated women face disproportionate unemployment. An IMF analysis of data from 2024 found unemployment among highly educated women to be 16.66 percent, compared to 6.37 percent among similarly educated men. In practice, a woman finds she must be qualified but not intimidating, ambitious but accommodating, and professionally committed but also available for domestic duties. Employers worry about marriage, maternity, and childcare as though reproduction were an unfortunate personal hobby rather than a fundamental part of society’s continuation. The country celebrates female empowerment at conferences while workplace structures likely assume that somebody else will handle the children. And then, of course, we lament the exit of talented women from the workforce.

Perhaps the cruellest consequence of graduate unemployment is the normalisation of wasted potential. Young Bangladeshis increasingly treat migration as an escape. Families invest in overseas degrees, professional qualifications, and migration pathways because they no longer trust the domestic economy to reward their children’s abilities. Bangladesh trains its people, foreign economies benefit from their productivity, and we console ourselves with remittance figures. Even entrepreneurship, routinely prescribed as the miracle cure to unemployment, cannot flourish based on motivational speeches alone. Starting a business requires capital, reliable electricity, predictable regulation, functioning banks, and customers with purchasing power. Telling unemployed graduates to become entrepreneurs without addressing these conditions is rather like advising someone trapped in a flood to consider starting up a swimming school.

Bangladesh does not need another ceremonial employment summit featuring distinguished speakers explaining that young people are the future. It needs measurable job creation targets, transparent recruitment processes, serious apprenticeships, better vocational education, affordable financing, and industrial diversification beyond garments. The World Bank’s export diversification programme, which supported the creation of nearly 1,80,000 jobs in targeted non-garment firms, demonstrated that deliberate investment can produce tangible employment. Above all, economic success must be measured not merely by GDP growth, export receipts, or the number of new graduates, but by whether ordinary people can obtain dignified, productive work and build independent lives.

Unemployment is not simply an economic statistic; it postpones marriages, erodes confidence, deepens socioeconomic inequality, drains family savings, and turns adulthood into an indefinite waiting room. Bangladesh’s young people have been instructed to study more, work harder, improve themselves, learn English, acquire digital skills, and remain resilient. They have largely complied. Perhaps it is time the economy updated its own CV.

Barrister Noshin Nawal is a columnist for The Daily Star. She can be reached at [email protected]

Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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