Across South Africa right now, the ritual of graduation season is in full swing. Families are gathering in auditoriums from Durban to Cape Town, Pretoria to East London. The University of South Africa alone is  in its current autumn cycle. Vice-chancellors are delivering speeches about resilience and the nation’s future. And proud parents are taking photographs of their offspring holding the scroll that is the supposed key to their own future.

But is it? When the gowns are returned and the students step en masse into the real world, what will they find? The numbers tell a story that nobody is broadcasting from the podium.

South Africa’s public universities are producing over 220,000 graduates annually, with more than a million students currently enrolled, more than 30,000 teachers, nearly 12,000 engineers, more than 10,000 physical scientists, and nearly 9,000 life scientists.

Yet official statistics reveal that graduate unemployment from 8.7 to 11.7 per cent in the , the sharpest single-quarter rise in recent years. Unemployment rates usually spike in Q1, when new graduates enter the market, and, by the end of the year, the rate had to 10.3 per cent. But in the first quarter of , it rose sharply again, to 12.2 per cent. And among graduates under 35, the unemployment rate reached in Q1 of 2025.

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Even that figure, admittedly, is well below South Africa’s national unemployment rate, currently 32.7 per cent (rising to 37.6 per cent among those that didn’t even graduate from high school). But it has since 2019, when it was just 7.9 per cent even in Q1.

The post-pandemic unemployment crisis is not uniquely South African, of course. Across the Global South, education systems are , and the skills graduates hold are increasingly misaligned with what employers say they need.

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But South Africa’s structural context makes the stakes considerably higher. Overall, 37.6 per cent of under-35s were not in employment, education or training in Q1 of 2026, and unemployment among youth searching for work for over a year  40 per cent in 2015 to over 50 per cent in 2025. That is, 2 million young South Africans have .

Regarding graduates, the “skills mismatch” narrative is everywhere in policy discourse. And there is some validity to this – particularly in light of the rise of AI. McKinsey’s Global Institute  that up to 20 per cent of work activities in South Africa could be automated by 2030, displacing over 3 million workers without adequate reskilling, and the World Economic Forum estimates that, currently, only about one-sixth of South Africans currently have advanced digital skills.

Part of the reason is that South Africa’s education system is  and outdated qualification frameworks that can take years to update. Universities South Africa’s  found that while institutions broadly recognise the need to integrate technology, both curricula and lecturers are lagging.

At universities, work-integrated learning needs to be embedded across all qualifications from the first year, rather than being a final-year afterthought. So should digital and AI literacy, alongside entrepreneurship education that trains graduates to create work and not merely seek it.

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges warrant some scrutiny, too. In 2024-25, they , but only just over 18,000 graduates were placed in workplaces (against a planned 21,000). The pipeline is leaking at every joint.

But pinning all the blame on tertiary education lets governments and employers off the hook. The research forum Econ3x3  that the rise in graduate unemployment over the past decade was predominantly linked to a sluggish labour market, not to what students studied. No curriculum reform, however bold, will allow us to teach our way out of that.

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The Department of Employment and Labour’s own spokesperson  earlier this year that skills and investment were both “critical to creating employment opportunities” and that both were currently lacking. That is a candid admission from the government and it demands a policy response.

North-West University’s senior deputy vice-chancellor for teaching and learning, Linda du Plessis, put it plainly in her own comments to the newspaper: “Higher education must adapt curricula for employability, but it cannot resolve the labour market mismatch alone. This challenge necessitates systemic coordination between education, industry and government.” That sentence should be pinned to the wall of every cabinet meeting that discusses youth unemployment.

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Higher education, science and technology minister Buti Manamela needs to keep in mind that pumping another 220,000 graduates every year into an economy that cannot absorb them is not a success metric. It is a pressure gauge. And job creation can’t be done in a speech. Coordinated industrial policy that generates formal-sector graduate employment is a constitutional obligation to a generation whose members have done everything asked of them.

As for employers, they must stop demanding “experienced” graduates while refusing to build the internship and placement infrastructure that creates experience. The private sector’s engagement with the government’s  is welcome in this regard. This programme has placed over 228,000 young people into quality work experiences since its launch in 2018, with 60 per cent of its alumni and 17 per cent starting their own businesses. YES CEO Ravi Naidoo has noted that the highest placement volumes are now in digital and ICT, the green economy and financial services: precisely the sectors expanding in an AI-augmented economy.

But while this is a proof of concept, it is not yet a solution at scale. Offering internships and placements must become an industry-wide norm, not simply a tokenistic means to get the certificate they need to operate legally in South Africa.

Ultimately, of course, employment is about more than earning a wage. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued in his landmark 1999 work , genuine development is not measured by GDP or employment rates alone, but by the expansion of opportunities to live lives people have reason to value. We should never forget that behind the current unemployment figures are so many thwarted human lives.

The challenge of graduate unemployment in South Africa, then, is not fundamentally an education problem or a labour market problem. It is a question about what kind of society this country wants – and whether its institutions, its government, its universities and its private sector are genuinely prepared to build it together.

Pikolomzi Qaba writes on higher education policy, youth development and social justice in South Africa and the African continent.

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