Introduction
When we talk about the relevance of education today and its relationship with employment, we have to dive into various complex problems that involve almost every element of our daily lives. In the past, education was seen as a certain key that would lead someone toward success, a decent job, a high salary, and security in old age. Today, we look at education through a completely different lens. It is no longer a guarantee of having a better life. Education, especially university education, has become a minimum threshold just for someone to at least be considered within the modern employment system.
To understand this problem more thoroughly, we need to go back to the early period when education, or the education system itself, first emerged. Etymologically, education is essentially a process of training critical thinking and shaping character. In the earliest period of its history, education was a process of passing down ways of life: how to farm, how to raise animals, and how to maintain the social structure within a community. At this time, education was not a formal process, but rather something that emerged from the basic human need to preserve the species. Education began to become a formal institution around 3000 to 3500 BC in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, when schools for scribes were systematically established to teach cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing. The first foundations of academic education were laid around 500 BC–400 AD. During this period, the focus of education shifted from merely teaching literacy toward the pursuit of knowledge, philosophy, and character. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle established academies that later became some of the foundations of the modern university. This process did not happen only in Europe. In many other parts of the world, such as India and China, formal education also developed, including education influenced by Confucian teachings and examination systems for government officials.
Moving into the pre-modern period, from around the 5th to the 15th century, after the fall of the Roman Empire, religious institutions became the guardians of formal education. In the Christian world of Europe, cathedral schools were established to educate future priests and monks. Meanwhile, during the Islamic Golden Age, the concept of formal education developed rapidly through madrasas. Institutions such as Al-Qarawiyyin University, founded in the 9th century in Morocco, and Al-Azhar, founded in the 10th century in Egypt, integrated religious studies with science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. During this period, education and educated people were seen as pillars of a nation’s progress. They learned, conducted research, and then directly implemented the results of their research in society to solve existing problems.
So, what about today? Education today, in essence, still carries the noble values that have been upheld for hundreds of years. Education through formal institutions is still considered one of the best ways to produce highly skilled people. However, the way most people view education today is often no longer aligned with the original values of education itself. Many people assume that once we finish university and obtain a bachelor’s degree, a decent job, a high salary, and social status will automatically follow. This mindset shifts the noble purpose of education from what was originally intended to train critical thinking and the ability to solve problems into merely the easiest way to get a job. Society’s understanding of what it means to be an educated person has also narrowed into something as simple as “as long as you have a diploma.”
Is It Wrong?
Considering education, especially university, as one of the fastest paths toward employment, or hoping that going to university can improve the economic condition of one’s family, is not entirely wrong, even though this does not really reflect the noble values of education itself. The fact is, in the modern world, it is precisely the world around us that forces us to think this way. Go to school, go to university, graduate with good grades, and your chances of getting a decent job will increase, or you may even be almost guaranteed to get the job you want. This mindset worked for our grandparents and our parents. At that time, people with bachelor’s degrees were extremely rare. According to BPS, in Indonesia, the percentage of people with university degrees during the early 1980s to the 1990s was still below one percent. Economic and industrial growth in Indonesia was accelerating rapidly at the time. There were many job vacancies, many industries needed skilled workers from various fields, and university graduates became their main recruitment targets.
The problem begins when that same mindset is carried into the present. Things that were once considered golden tickets to employment by our parents have now become ordinary. The number of university graduates in Indonesia has exploded. More than 10% of Indonesians now hold bachelor’s degrees, with around 1.26 million new graduates added in 2025 alone, according to the Ministry of Education. This number even exceeds the cumulative number of people with bachelor’s degrees during the twenty-year period from the 1970s to the 1990s. This explosion in the number of university graduates then triggers one of the most basic laws of economics: supply and demand. When supply increases without being accompanied by an adequate increase in demand for workers, the result is that out of around 11.6 million people with bachelor’s degrees, around one million of them are unemployed. Even more concerning, more than 400,000 of them are fresh graduates from 2025.
From a Premium to a Minimum Requirement: Where Do Graduates Who Cannot Enter the Workforce Go?
A degree that once felt special is slowly losing its value. Not because the knowledge itself is useless, but because the number of people holding that degree is growing far faster than the demand from the labor market. Twenty years ago, becoming a university graduate was an extraordinary achievement. In many families, perhaps only one person had ever managed to go to university. A bachelor’s degree became a symbol of social mobility. New graduates still carried the belief inherited from their parents that once they graduated, jobs would come looking for them. But today, the situation has reversed. A bachelor’s degree is no longer an advantage. It has become a minimum requirement. Even for many job vacancies with salaries not far above the minimum wage, companies have begun asking for bachelor’s degrees, work experience, English proficiency, and even additional certifications.
Competition is no longer between high school graduates and university graduates. Competition now happens among university graduates themselves. And this is what many economists call credential inflation. When more and more people possess the same degree, the value of that degree itself decreases. Just like money losing its purchasing power when too much of it is printed, a degree that almost everyone has gradually loses its ability to distinguish one person from another in the labor market. As a result, people are continuously pushed toward higher levels of education. A master’s degree becomes the new standard, professional certifications appear everywhere, and additional courses become almost mandatory. Not necessarily because the labor market genuinely needs all of these things, but because everyone is competing simply to avoid being left behind. The problem is that this race never truly ends. Once everyone has a bachelor’s degree, companies ask for a master’s degree. When master’s degrees become more common, work experience becomes the main requirement. Once people have experience, another new skill suddenly becomes something they are expected to have. Competition transforms into a race with no finish line. Every time someone feels that they have finally done enough, another standard appears. At this point, a phenomenon that might have seemed unbelievable several years ago begins to happen: highly educated people start entering the informal sector.
Online Motorcycle Taxis, Coffee Shops, and Roadside Stalls Become an Escape,
They open small coffee shops, sell food on the roadside, become street vendors, or work as online motorcycle taxi drivers. Not because they failed to learn, but because the economy is unable to fulfill the promise of education. At this point, a misleading perspective begins to appear. When someone with a bachelor’s degree sells fried rice on the roadside, many people immediately say, “It doesn’t matter, at least the work is halal.” The statement sounds correct, but saying that immediately closes the opportunity to ask a much deeper question. The problem is not how they earn money to survive, but why someone who spent more than a decade pursuing education eventually has to work in a field that does not require any of the competencies they spent years developing simply in order to survive. Imagine someone spending four to six years at university, spending tens or even hundreds of millions of rupiah, sacrificing time and energy, perhaps even leaving their family in debt, all because they believed that education was an investment in their future. Do not misunderstand this. It does not mean that those jobs are inferior. Rather, it means that there is clearly something that is not working the way it should. What makes this even more interesting is that this paradox is no longer happening to just one or two people. It has become a social phenomenon.
Another Phenomenon,
Another phenomenon that has become increasingly common among university graduates is the mismatch between their field of study and their actual work. Not necessarily because they changed their dreams, but because the opportunities available are far fewer than the number of people competing for them. Once again, education, which was once promised as a way out, has instead transformed into a long race that does not guarantee a finish line. And then the question changes: what if the problem is not education itself? Perhaps the problem is not that too many people are going to university. Perhaps it is also not because they chose the wrong major. Then what exactly is broken? Why is society continuously pushed to pursue education as high as possible while constantly being haunted by the fear of being left behind?
Meanwhile, the system waiting at the end of that road is not even capable of accommodating all of those who successfully make it there. The longer we observe and think about this phenomenon, the clearer it becomes that the problem does not begin when someone is sitting inside a university classroom. The problem begins after they graduate. Because in the end, education has never created jobs. Education today only creates graduates. It is the economy that is supposed to create jobs.
The Greatest Paradox,
This is where the greatest paradox begins to emerge. Universities successfully graduate large numbers of new students every year, yet employment opportunities grow far more slowly. As a result, every new graduating class does not only have to compete against people from the same graduating year, but also against graduates from previous years who still have not found jobs. And then there are those who already have jobs but want to move because they feel their salaries are too low or their work environments are unsuitable. All of this continuously adds pressure to fresh graduates.
Companies may receive thousands of applicants for a single position. As a result, they can continue raising their standards while suppressing salaries as much as possible. Jobs that once required only a high school diploma now require a bachelor’s degree. Positions that previously required a bachelor’s degree now prefer master’s graduates. Even relatively simple administrative positions have begun requiring two to three years of work experience from fresh graduates. An irony: how are they supposed to have work experience when they are not even given an opportunity to begin? The harshness of this competition and this reality causes many people to accept whatever job is available. They are no longer searching for jobs related to their field of study. They are searching for jobs simply so they can survive. At this point, the informal sector becomes an escape: trading, opening small businesses, becoming drivers, selling food, or selling anything that can generate money faster than waiting for a job call that may never come. Ironically, the informal sector becomes the largest absorber of workers when the formal sector is no longer capable of accommodating them. Some people might say, “But isn’t that a good thing? It means they are creative and willing to work hard.” And yes, there is absolutely nothing wrong with becoming a trader or building your own business. But we need to distinguish between choosing and being forced to choose. Some people become traders because they see an opportunity. Others become traders because every other door has already been closed. From the outside, these two situations may look exactly the same, but the stories behind them are very, very different.
Closing,
The Shift in Perspective,
The paradoxes that have emerged are slowly but surely changing the way society looks at education. In the past, people went to university to pursue knowledge, but today many people go to university simply because they are afraid of losing the competition. A degree is no longer a symbol of knowledge. It seems to have transformed into a guarantee that someone will not immediately be eliminated before the selection process even begins. As a result, society no longer looks at education through its noble values. University is no longer seen as a place to develop a way of thinking, but increasingly as a factory that produces a piece of paper simply to prolong one more breath.
Even more concerning, this condition creates a form of disappointment that is difficult to see. When someone fails to get a job after spending years studying, they often blame themselves, and perhaps the people around them do the same. Maybe they were not smart enough, maybe they did not have enough connections, or maybe they simply did not work hard enough. But the problem is much larger than the individual. When millions of people experience the same fate, the problem can no longer be understood merely as an individual failure, but as a problem of the system.
On the other hand, this paradox is also creating a generation that has slowly begun to lose faith in the promise of education. Younger siblings watch their older brothers and sisters graduate, only to remain unemployed for years. Parents begin questioning whether the enormous cost of university education is truly worth it. And yet, they still feel that they have no other choice. They still have to keep moving with the current. The fear of taking another path, because of uncertainty and limitation, makes this feel like something more than just a paradox. It becomes a chain of economic and social imprisonment.