To me the most telling sentence in this African Development Bank Group (AfDB) report (362 page PDF) is this one: "Many taxi drivers in Algiers (Algeria) hold graduate and even post-graduate degrees in the humanities and in the social sciences. In Douala (Cameroon), many Bensikineurs (motorcycle taxis) also hold degrees from advanced tertiary education, including in math and sciences." Now, it may be true that the skills they learned aren't in demand. But is the problem here that the students studied the wrong things? I don't think so. In a properly functioning economy their skills would be in demand, but there are so many gaps in the social structure, the economy cannot function at that level, and they don't have a good recourse or fall-back position. It's easy to blame the student - but we're only one good recession away from facing the same situation here in North America. Simply preparing for a different sort of job won't protect people from an inherently fragile economy.
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