All over the Kingdom new college graduates are being congratulated. Just recently 11,000 students of both sexes graduated from two universities in Riyadh. These will soon join many other graduates who are still searching for employment. If the market cannot absorb 11,000 graduates from two universities, how can it possibly cope with the army leaving the Kingdom’s other six universities?

The problem is that with a few exceptions the employment of graduates has long been confined to one single area: Teaching. Graduates seeking employment, regardless of what subject they have studied, have the choice of taking a teaching job or remaining unemployed.

It seems that our entire society is on its way to being taken over by teachers. It is like a vehicle on a one-way road reserved for teachers with no space for engineers, administrators, geologists, economists, physicists, researchers or anyone else.

Does this mean the state no longer needs people with other specialties now that our universities serve only as suppliers to the Ministry of Education? If the trend continues, we may soon witness the demise of the civil service.

It is a dangerous situation that could seriously affect the future of coming generations. We need to have a close look at how the employment process is conducted. This calls for the creation of more non-teaching jobs and the injection of fresh blood into the body of a civil service currently dominated by teachers.

To balance the process, we need to introduce radical changes in education strategies and policies. Before anything else we must first — and immediately — stop the car from sliding off the road.

It is not uncommon in a family with five working members to find three teachers. I don’t have reliable statistics about the number of graduates forced to take up teaching jobs, but according to the Ministry of Education, there are now 400,000 teachers employed in public schools. This is a huge figure compared to the total number of government employees.

Why not set a ceiling for government jobs to ensure that different sectors get their required numbers of new graduates who have majored in a range of subjects?

- Arab News From the Local Press 10 July 2003