Every year, hundreds of thousands of young Pakistanis graduate believing that a university degree will open the door to opportunity. For many, the ceremony marks not the beginning of a career, but the start of a longer search for work, stability and a place in an increasingly competitive job market.
It has been almost a year since Annie finished her degree, and she still flinches a little when people ask what she does.
She graduated in July 2025 with a Bachelor’s in Social Sciences from a university, majoring in Psychology. She had done everything right completed an internship at a mental health clinic, worked a customer service job alongside it, attended workshops, finished online courses, kept herself, as she puts it, “active out there.” Within six weeks of graduating, she had secured two opportunities simultaneously. For a brief, luminous moment, she let herself believe she had beaten the odds.
Then both contracts ended. And the wall appeared.
“I started searching again,” she says, “and the quest has been very difficult.” Jobs in her field either demanded clinical credentials she doesn’t yet hold, or paid wages that couldn’t cover transport, rent, and a household contribution. The commutes were brutal and for a marginalized woman navigating Karachi alone, “brutal” means something more than long. Some workplaces were unwelcoming in ways she does not elaborate on but does not need to. She began sliding toward remote freelance work digital contracts, small online gigs not out of ambition but out of calculation. Working from home removed the commute problem. It introduced others. “I feel like in today’s age, digital work is really easy to get,” she says, “but the payoff is very less.”
Annie’s story is not unusual. It is the story of a generation and within that generation, it is disproportionately the story of its women.
Between 2020 and 2024, Pakistani universities produced approximately 445,000 graduates annually around 2.225 million over five years, according to the Higher Education Commission. The HEC itself, established in 2002, oversaw a rapid expansion of higher education institutions across the country: more campuses, more departments, more seats, more certificates. The message to young Pakistanis was consistent: a degree is your ticket.
For young women especially, higher education carried a particular charge. Getting a daughter through university was, in many families, an act of genuine sacrifice and genuine hope proof of modernity, a hedge against an uncertain future, a credential that might give her choices her mother never had. Pakistani women now make up nearly half of university enrolments. That number is, genuinely, a triumph.
What happens after the degree is a different story.
Humaira is a final-year journalism student at a university, still living inside the promise but its edges are already fraying. She speaks with the particular lucidity of someone who can see the cliff approaching but has not yet gone over.
“Previously, my plan was to stay in Pakistan,” she says quietly. “But in the last one or two years, I’ve seen such bad scenarios when it comes to inflation and everything I feel like I would be very, very happy to move to another country. Somewhere in Europe.”
She is finishing her final year. She is already planning her exit. She is not alone in this but the calculus of leaving looks different for a young woman in Pakistan than it does for a young man. For her, migration is not just an economic decision. It is also, quietly, a question of what kind of life is available to her.
According to the Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2024-25, youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stands at 12.5%. For young women, it exceeds 13%. In urban centres, the rate for women climbs to 17-18%. And those are only the women counted as actively seeking work – the ones the survey can find. Approximately 55% of young Pakistani women aged 15 to 29 are not in education, employment, or training. Many are not unemployed by the market’s definition because they have stopped looking altogether.
Sehr graduated with a BBA Honours in 2026. She describes the post-graduation period with the flat exhaustion of someone who has been applying for months without success. “The biggest challenge,” she says, “is that the job market is very crowded.” She had believed, as so many students do, that life after university would simplify. No more assignments, no more morning rush to campus, just work and the beginning of real independence.
“After university, I thought that all assignments will end, I won’t have to do any work, life will become easy,” she says. “Well, after that everything did end. But the factor of a job hasn’t come yet.”
