Education makes you go for a salaried job life and that should be corrected.

Pakistan’s education system is producing job applicants — not job creators.

The graduate unemployment crisis is not simply a shortage of jobs. It is also the predictable outcome of an education system that teaches people to escape business and self-employment in search of a salary.

Analysis by Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey 2024–25 shows a striking shift:

Among employed Pakistanis with no education, 36% are salaried employees and 35% are self-employed.

Among those with higher education, 67% are salaried, while self-employment falls to just 25%.

In other words, as education rises, the aspiration funnel becomes narrower: get a degree, prepare a CV, sit for tests, and wait for an organisation—or the government—to hire you.

That model may work when an economy creates formal jobs faster than universities create graduates. Pakistan does the opposite. We expand higher education, produce hundreds of thousands of degree-holders, and then direct nearly all of them toward the same limited pool of salaried positions.

The result is inevitable: educated unemployment alongside businesses complaining that they cannot find people willing or able to build, sell, manage risk and create markets.

This does not mean every self-employed person is an entrepreneur. Nor should salaried employment be dismissed. But when education systematically moves people away from independent economic activity without creating enough formal employment, graduate unemployment is not a mystery. It is a design flaw.

Perhaps the real crisis is not that graduates cannot find jobs.

It is that our education system has convinced them that finding a job is the only respectable definition of success.

Source: Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2024–25. Analysis by Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics.