September 13-2013
University students will flock back to campuses next week—but, for probably the first time in Iran’s history, there will be many empty seats.
One university official says the main reason is the fact that so many university graduates are unable to find jobs, so the value of higher education doesn’t kook as good as it once did.
Mohammad-Hadi Naji, an official at Payam-e Nur University, said there 730,000 undergraduate seats at all of the nation’s universities, but only 690,000 have registered to be students this fall. That is a 5 percent vacancy rate.
He said the vacancies are largely among male students. That may surprise some since colleges have been increasingly segregating students by gender in the past year, which some thought (and others hoped) would discourage women from attending college.
Naji said male students have been changing their attitude toward higher education as the labor market tightens and college graduates are finding it even harder to find jobs than high school graduates.
The Islamic Republic vastly expanded the size of the student body after the revolution in an effort to offer a college education to everybody who wanted one. Many analysts had predicted, based on the experience in other countries, that the point where college grads would exceed demand would be reached long before this.
Women comprised 65 percent of college enrollment a few years ago, promoting conservatives in the regime to take greater efforts to discourage women from attending college. But the opposite now appears to be happening. The proportion of women registered for this fall has not yet been published.