Nader Habibi

The people of Iran place a very high value on higher education. One of the most important aspirations of parents is to send their children to a good university so that they can graduate with the credentials to find a good job and become economically successful. There is nothing wrong with this aspiration and we know that education at any level has positive benefits for the society. However, when the majority of households send their children to universities a country might find itself with an excess supply of university graduates. If the economy provides insufficient numbers of jobs for university graduates, then the country confronts a crisis when many of them end up unemployed or having to accept jobs that do not match their level of education. Iran is among a list of countries that have experienced this type of overeducation crisis in the past decade, seen in very high unemployment rates among university graduates.