For decades, Pakistani parents had one dream and one answer to every career question their children asked....
COVER STORY
For decades, Pakistani parents had one dream and one answer to every career question their children asked. A nation of 220 million people, each with a completely different opinion about almost every subject on earth, somehow united, briefly, beautifully and catastrophically, on the only topic where disagreement might actually have saved someone. Believe it or not, an entire generation was told, "Here are your two options: become a doctor or become an engineer. Now shut up and pick one." Two options. For a nation that cannot even agree on who makes the best biryani. Two laughably limited options. I mean, even a paan wala offers more choices than that.
Your actual interests? Dismissed as childish fantasies. Market reality? Never investigated, because that would have required effort. Yes! The same people who spent forty-five minutes arguing about the correct way to make chai somehow never spent forty-five seconds asking whether the job market actually needed this many engineers. And a simple conversation about what you might enjoy? That would have required seeing you as a person rather than a status symbol. And heaven forbid that you dared to say you wanted to study arts, commerce or social sciences.
The same families who once spent years laughing at commerce students are now quietly enrolling their children in BBA programmes. The same people who sneered at graduates of management sciences are now proudly telling everyone that their son is pursuing an MBA. Meanwhile, the very fathers who dismissed the arts as a complete waste of time and a path to failure are now encouraging their daughters to study psychology and linguistics because those graduates are employed, building successful careers and bringing money home at the end of the month. It turns out that the "useless degree" was paying the bills all along, while the "respectable degree" was updating its CV for the fourteenth time. The daughter who was almost prevented from studying psychology is now the only earning member in a house full of engineers. What exactly do you call that? Because, from where I stand, it looks like one of the most embarrassing examples of hypocrisy imaginable.
"Doctor or engineer." A sentence repeated fifteen million times has produced four hundred thousand tragedies. Speaking of tragedies, let me put it in Shakespearean style: "Here lieth the career of the engineer working as a cab driver. Here lieth the diploma of the doctor now selling credit cards." Just imagine if Shakespeare had been born in Pakistan. His name would have been Dr Sheikh Peer. His most famous line, "To be or not to be", would have become, "To be a doctor or to be an engineer." Thank God Shakespeare never had to face the Pakistani relatives system.
Pakistani society flooded its own job market with engineers and doctors, not because the economy needed that many professionals, not because hospitals and industries were desperately waiting for them, but because drawing-room conversations declared that these fields had scope. That one thoughtless, unquestioned sentence, repeated at every dinner table and family gathering for an entire generation, has now damaged the professional future of hundreds of thousands of young people who made the mistake of trusting the adults around them.
Before going any further, let me stop you before you misunderstand my point. Lovers of medicine and engineering, if your heart genuinely lies in medicine or engineering, this message is not directed at you. This is not an anti-degree article. It is an article against forcing young people into careers they never wanted. If you are passionate about saving lives in a hospital, or if you wake up excited about building bridges, designing machines or writing code, then pursue that dream with everything you have. The world needs people who are genuinely called to these professions. This heartfelt critique is about something entirely different. It is about the thousands of students who had no interest whatsoever in these fields, who possessed completely different strengths and dreams, yet were pushed into these degrees because their parents could not imagine any other definition of success. Their imagination stopped at two words, and an entire generation paid the price for that lack of vision. I strongly believe that you cannot put every child into the same square and expect the same result. A surgeon's hands and a painter's hands are both gifted. But if you force the painter to operate and the surgeon to paint, you do not end up with two successes. You end up with two disasters and a society that has wasted the talents of both.
Scope. Now, let us talk about that "scope" everyone was so incredibly confident about.
The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) has confirmed what many people refused to see: engineer unemployment doubled in just two years, rising from 11 percent to more than 23 percent. Folks, please focus on one word: "DOUBLED."
And doctors are not doing any better. Between 20,000 and 30,000 doctors are currently unemployed in Pakistan. These are not people who failed their examinations. These are people who studied for five years, cleared some of the toughest entry tests in the country, survived relentless academic pressure, completed their house jobs and emerged on the other side with absolutely nowhere to go.
And here comes the real spirit breaker. It is no longer outsiders raising the alarm. Doctors and engineers themselves are shouting at the top of their lungs, urging the next generation to stay away. When the people who won the race return to the starting line and tell everyone else not to run, something has gone terribly wrong with the race. These are people who lived the lie, paid the price and now feel morally obligated to warn those who are still listening.
Further evidence comes from Dr Osama Idrees Khan himself, not an outsider but an insider with millions of followers. His conclusion? The system has failed its youngest members. While other doctors on Instagram post polished photographs of aesthetic clinics, Dr Osama posts reality checks. Let me remind you that this is a practising doctor, not a failed student or someone bitter about an entry test. This is someone who completed the entire journey and is still telling others it was not worth it. When the people who successfully survive the journey begin warning others not to take the same road, that is not a complaint. It is an emergency broadcast. I also salute this brave doctor for speaking from the heart.
Moreover, here are some figures that should give every parent pause. According to Dental News, Punjab's private medical colleges were left with 426 vacant MBBS seats even after the University of Health Sciences, Lahore, had published its fifth and final selection list. Yes! Out of 4,350 available seats across 33 private medical colleges, hundreds remained unfilled. Five selection lists, yet the seats still could not be filled. Let that sink in. A few years ago, families were doing everything possible to secure a single medical seat. Today, those very seats are going begging.
And this crisis is not limited to medicine. A 2024 review by the PIDE found that more than 31 per cent of Pakistan's young graduates are unemployed. And the group suffering the most? Those with postgraduate degrees. How does it make sense that the people who studied the longest are waiting the longest for jobs? What kind of return on investment is that after years of sacrifice?
So what happens now? The very graduates who were once told that arts and commerce were worthless fields are quietly moving towards those same disciplines. MBA programmes are overflowing. Content writing, digital marketing, graphic design and the social sciences are suddenly full of people with engineering and medical degrees who are trying to rebuild a future that someone else's ego destroyed.
The empty seats in Pakistan's medical and engineering colleges are not a problem. They are a correction that was long overdue. They represent young people finally choosing reality over reputation. The real problem is the generation of parents and educators who built this entire disaster on a foundation of status, stubbornness and a complete refusal to update their understanding of how the world was changing.
