South Africa graduated 220,758 students from its public universities last year, and more than one million are enrolled in higher education — more graduates than at any point in the country’s history.
Yet, in the first quarter of 2026, the youth unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 reached 60.9%. For those aged 15 to 34, the cohort we most associate with graduate employment, it stood at 45.8%.
Nearly 4.7-million young South Africans who want to work cannot find a job, and more than four in 10 young people are not in employment, education or training at all.
We are producing more graduates. We are also producing more unemployed graduates. Something is profoundly wrong, and it is not the ambition of South Africa’s young people. It is the system we have built around them.
Problem is the content
The truth our higher education sector has been slow to confront is that we have measured the wrong thing. For decades, graduation rates have been treated as a proxy for progress: more graduates equals better outcomes. The logic seemed sound, yet the data says otherwise.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in its most recent economic survey of South Africa, identified mismatches between workers’ qualifications, their fields of study and available jobs as a primary driver of unemployment.
This is alongside a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers that constrains long-term growth even as graduates remain jobless. We are producing too many graduates in the wrong fields and too few in those the economy needs.
Research has found more than half of all workers show skills mismatches, among the highest rates of any country studied and exceeding those of India and Russia.
A quarter of graduates are over-educated for the work they find, while another quarter are under-educated. The properly matched middle is narrower than we would like to admit.
The fields driving this imbalance are not obscure. Commerce and the humanities account for most South African graduations, while sectors such as education, construction, safety and security, and agriculture are creating jobs. Engineering, IT, data science and cybersecurity are crying out for professionals. The pipeline is not meeting the demand.
Collapse of vocational education made this worse
A second structural failure rarely receives the attention it deserves. South Africa’s vocational and technical pathway — the TVET college system, formerly the technikon model — has declined sharply in quality and standing over the past two decades.
The decline has driven far greater demand for university places, yet universities cannot absorb it: little has been invested in expanding campuses or building new institutions. The result is a bottleneck.
Young people who would thrive in applied, occupational programmes are ushered towards degrees not designed for them and not valued by the industries that should employ them.
The artisan, the technician, the engineering technologist, these are the professionals our economy needs in their tens of thousands. We have systematically devalued the pathways that produce them.
At the National Education Summit 2026, higher education and training minister Buti Manamela framed the crisis as systemic, warning misaligned education directly fuels unemployment: “You cannot study qualifications that would lead to dead-end jobs,” he said.
He is right. But reform of the qualifications landscape — including the South African Qualifications Authority’s phasing out of 1,475 legacy pre-2009 qualifications — is only meaningful if institutions fill the space with programmes built for today’s economy, not that of 30 years ago.
Experience the invisible barrier
A further dimension escapes the statistics. Research tracking South African youth found those with work experience move from unemployment to employment at four times the rate of those without it. The qualification matters, but the experience dividend is transformative.
This creates a cruel paradox. Employers want graduates with experience but graduates cannot gain experience without employment. The system does not resolve this paradox, it entrenches it.
Qualifications with mandatory workplace components, industry partnerships and practical application are no longer merely preferable, they are essential. A degree without a structured pathway to professional practice is, too often, a very expensive piece of paper.
South Africa does not have a graduate surplus problem. It has a relevance problem. We are producing qualifications by the hundreds of thousands that do not connect to the economy, while 3.9-million young people aged 15 to 24 are not in employment, education or training at all — disengaged entirely from a system that has failed to offer them something worth engaging with.
South Africa’s young people are not the problem. The problem is a system that has measured its own inputs — graduation numbers, enrolment figures, throughput rates — rather than its outputs: employed, productive, economically active young South Africans building the country they deserve to inherit.
That is the conversation our education sector needs to have, and it needs to have it urgently.
- Smalberger is CEO of the Academic Institute of Excellence
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