Every
year, as the results of the General Secondary Education Certificate Examination
(Tawjihi) are announced and preparations for university admissions begin, the
same question arises for tens of thousands of young men and women and their
families: Which major should we choose? Today, however, this question has
become increasingly complicated.
اضافة اعلان
Jordanian professional associations have begun
issuing more frequent warnings against the continued expansion of university
enrollment in fields that, until recently, represented the highest levels of
social aspiration, such as medicine, dentistry, and engineering, due to the
growing number of graduates and the limited employment opportunities available
to them.
The
Jordan Dental Association recently warned of worsening unemployment and
declining incomes within the profession, urging students and their parents to
base their study choices on labour market indicators rather than on the
traditional social image associated with the profession.
The Jordan Medical
Association has similarly warned that unemployment among doctors is becoming a
tangible reality, while the Jordan Engineers Association continues to issue
guidance bulletins identifying engineering specializations that are stagnant or
already saturated.
These
warnings are important, but they reveal only part of the problem rather than
explaining it in full. The challenge is not simply that students are choosing
fields with limited demand, or that there is an oversupply of graduates in
certain professions.
The deeper problem is that, for years, the Jordanian
economy has had a weak capacity to generate enough new and decent jobs.
This
has coincided with structural imbalances in education and the labour market, as
well as low economic participation rates. As a result, unemployment is no
longer confined to specific fields but now affects a large majority of
professions and specializations.
This
requires us to reconsider the deeply rooted idea that links social status to a
particular university major.
Prevailing social attitudes have led generations
of students to believe that medicine, engineering, pharmacy, dentistry, law,
and other prestigious professions almost automatically provide a stable job, a
high income, and distinguished social standing.
But
the labour market has changed. A university degree, regardless of its social
prestige, is no longer a guarantee of employment. A significant proportion of
people eventually work in fields different from those they studied.
The ability
to learn, adapt, and continuously acquire new skills in response to changing
labour market demands has therefore become a key factor in professional
success.
Yet
placing the responsibility solely on students for making the “wrong” choices
would oversimplify the problem. Even if thousands of students stopped studying
medicine, engineering, or pharmacy, this would not solve the unemployment
crisis unless the performance of the economy itself improves, alongside the
development of the education and training system.
Jordan
needs an economy that is more capable of investing, producing, and exporting.
It needs high-value-added sectors that can create enough quality jobs.
It also
needs reform of the education system so that it becomes more closely connected
to economic and technological transformations, together with a genuine
expansion of high-quality technical and vocational education and training,
including opportunities for continuous learning after graduation.
At
the same time, calls for students to pursue so-called “majors of the future”
should not become a new illusion.
If large numbers of students rush into a
specialization that is currently viewed as highly promising, that field itself
could become saturated within only a few years.
The solution, therefore, is not
to replace one list of saturated majors with another.
It is to build a flexible
education system that provides young people with a strong foundation of
knowledge, broad-based fields of study, and continuous opportunities to develop
their skills.
This would enable them to move more easily between occupations as
labour market needs change, as they inevitably and continuously do.
The
main message to young people today is not that they should abandon their
ambitions, but that they should distinguish between the social prestige
associated with a particular field of study, which can be achieved in many
other ways, and its actual employment prospects.
The more important message for
policymakers is that graduate unemployment is, at its core, a reflection of an
economy that does not generate enough jobs.
Unless this structural problem is
addressed, every year we will continue warning students against studying a new
set of majors, while the fundamental problem remains unchanged.
