A report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) about unemployment in the country’s educated youth has come out at a very crucial time. It’s done a great job by employing data to give numbers to facts already largely known. According to its findings, as much as 31 percent of the youth in the country, with professional and graduate degrees, is currently unemployed; and of them 16pc are males and a staggering 51pc are females. Subsequent administrations have been aware of this trend for the longest time, and also that it is continuously worsening, but the breakdown in terms of numbers ought to give the government more to work with; and the least that is now expected of it is a strategy to deal with this phenomenon effectively. This is a very deep and serious argument, and one that goes well beyond providing jobs for people. We are a country with more than 60pc of its population below the age of 30 years, which makes this problem much worse. The fact that educated people are unable to find proper jobs – the report says that it takes up to 10 years for new entrants into the labour force to find work – means that everything from job prospects to the education system to the syllabi taught needs to be shaken up. And this is not something that is going to be solved just by the controversial Single National Curriculum (SNC). These are times when something long-term needs to be done for the economy as well. We can no longer just borrow to function as a state, and the economy is not going to improve if education is not up to international standards, and the job market is deprived of people with degrees and professional experience. Unless these things are sorted out there is no way that the economy can be turned around and made self-sufficient. We, as a country, still haven’t worked out how to add value to our human resource base even after all these decades. This needs to change, or the next such report will be worse. *