The growing disconnect between universities, employers and the future of work
Something is wrong with the way we prepare young people for work. We tell them to study hard. We tell them that education is the safest route to opportunity. We encourage them to spend years earning qualifications. Then, after graduation, many encounter employers asking for experience they have never had, technologies they were barely taught and skills that were not central to their education. That is not simply a difficult job market. It is a structural disconnect.
I kept encountering this problem while researching Stolen Youth: How Kenya’s Young Are Reclaiming Their Future. The book is about Kenya, but many of the trials confronting the generation at its center are unmistakably global. Whether we are talking about Nairobi, New York, Berlin, Beijing or London, young people are trying to enter economies changing faster than many of the institutions preparing them. The question is no longer simply whether Gen Z has enough education. Increasingly, we need to ask whether they are getting the right education for the world they are entering.
Gen Z Did What We Told Them to Do
This is what makes the problem particularly frustrating. Young people did not invent the education system. They did not decide that a university degree should become the primary ticket into the professional middle class. Governments, employers, universities, schools and families constructed that bargain over decades. Gen Z responded to it.
Globally, young people are spending more time in education. According to the International Labour Organization, 38 percent of the world’s young people were participating in education or training in 2000. By 2023, that figure had reached 48 percent.
Yet the economic return has not always kept pace. The ILO says educational mismatch has increased as the supply of educated young people has begun to exceed the supply of highly skilled jobs in many middle-income countries. In developing economies, roughly two out of three young adult workers hold qualifications that do not match their jobs well. Think about that contradiction.
We have succeeded in educating more young people while remaining much less successful at building economies capable of using all that education. That is not a Gen Z failure. It is a systems failure.
Employers Are Moving Faster Than Universities
The problem becomes even clearer when we listen to employers. The OECD now says labor markets are undergoing such rapid transformation that the gap is widening between the skills employers require and those formal education systems alone can provide. It describes a shift toward a “skills-first” labor market in which demonstrated capabilities increasingly matter alongside traditional credentials. This does not mean the university degree is disappearing. Nor should it. A serious university education provides intellectual depth that cannot be reduced to occupational training. But employers increasingly want something in addition to the degree.
They want digital competence. They want communication skills. They want problem-solving. They want adaptability. They want people who can work with new technologies and learn the next technology that arrives. Above all, they frequently want experience. And there we encounter one of the strangest contradictions in the modern labor market. How does a 22-year-old acquire three years of experience for an entry-level job?
We have created a system in which young people can successfully complete the educational requirements placed before them and still arrive at the employment door missing the qualification that can only be acquired after someone opens that door.
America Shows How Serious the Disconnect Can Become
The United States deserves particular attention because it built one of the world’s most extensive higher-education systems and attached enormous cultural and economic significance to the college degree. Yet the transition from college into work has become difficult for a substantial number of graduates.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that by the fourth quarter of 2025, unemployment among recent American college graduates had risen to approximately 5.7 percent. More strikingly, the underemployment rate reached 42.5 percent, its highest level since 2020. Underemployment in this measure refers to graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. That number should make us uncomfortable.
It does not prove that college is worthless. College graduates continue to enjoy important economic advantages over people with only high-school qualifications. But it does suggest that earning the credential and finding work appropriate to that credential are two very different things. There is another American complication: cost.
When education is expensive, the mismatch becomes more consequential. A graduate who paid relatively little for university and spends a year finding the right occupation faces one problem. A graduate carrying substantial education debt while working in a position that does not require the degree faces another. The American debate therefore cannot be limited to how many people attend college. We also have to ask what happens to them afterward.
Germany Starts With a Different Question
Germany offers an instructive contrast, although its system should not be romanticized or simply copied wholesale. Its dual vocational model connects theoretical education with employment much earlier. Young people in dual vocational training typically divide their time between a company, where they acquire practical experience, and vocational school, where they learn the theoretical component of an occupation. Programs generally last two to three years. Notice the difference in philosophy.
The workplace is not something waiting at the end of education. The workplace is part of education. That matters enormously. A young German completing this type of training does not have to explain to an employer why years of education produced no practical experience. The experience and education were deliberately connected. The model also recognizes something we have sometimes forgotten: university is not the only sophisticated form of postsecondary education.
Modern economies require technicians, advanced manufacturing workers, logistics specialists, electricians, healthcare workers, digital specialists and skilled tradespeople alongside physicians, professors, engineers and lawyers. Germany has institutionalized more than one respectable road into adulthood. That is an idea worth studying.
China Is Trying to Bring Industry Into Education
China offers another approach. Its government has been deliberately strengthening what it calls the integration of industry and education. A 2025 policy directive describes a system in which businesses contribute jobs, occupational standards and experienced mentors; schools contribute students, teachers and educational resources; and government provides policy, services and coordination. That is a remarkably different conception from education operating in one building and employers waiting somewhere else for the finished product.
China has also been reshaping vocational education around industrial priorities. According to its Ministry of Education, nearly 80 percent of specialized vocational program clusters were aligned with strategic and advanced manufacturing sectors under reforms highlighted in 2025. At the university level, new capacity has been directed toward fields including artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biotechnology and new energy.
China has its own educational challenges, and no national system should be treated as a perfect model. But the underlying principle is significant. Education planning and economic planning are being asked to speak to each other. That conversation needs to happen everywhere.
The Real Problem Is Not Too Much Education
I want to be very clear about this because conversations like this can quickly slide into the wrong argument. The answer is not less education. The answer is better alignment. A university is not merely a factory for producing employees. Education should expose people to history, literature, science, philosophy, politics, culture and ideas that have no immediate job description attached to them. Democracies need educated citizens just as economies need skilled workers. But we should reject the false choice between educating the whole person and preparing that person to earn a living. Surely we can do both.
A journalism student can study the history of the press while learning contemporary digital production and data journalism. A business student can study economic theory while working with actual business data. An engineering student can master engineering principles while spending meaningful time in modern production environments. Theory and practice are not enemies.
AI Is Making the Old Divide Even More Dangerous
Then there is artificial intelligence. This may be where the education-employment mismatch becomes most urgent. The occupational world can now change considerably during the years a student spends completing a degree. Some of the routine cognitive work historically assigned to junior employees can increasingly be performed or accelerated by AI. That raises a question universities cannot avoid.
If technology changes entry-level work, how will graduates acquire the experience traditionally obtained through entry-level work? The answer cannot simply be to add an AI course to every degree. Students need something deeper: technological literacy, analytical thinking, adaptability, communication, practical experience and the ability to continue learning long after formal education ends. Education can no longer be something we finish at 22.
Employers Need to Stop Complaining From the Sidelines
Universities deserve scrutiny, but employers do too. Businesses frequently say graduates lack the skills they require. Fine. Then businesses need to become much more deeply involved in producing those skills. You cannot demand experienced entry-level workers while eliminating entry-level opportunities.
Employers should dramatically expand paid internships, apprenticeships, graduate-training programs and partnerships with universities and technical institutions. Experienced professionals should spend time teaching. Students should spend time inside functioning workplaces. The boundary between classroom and workplace needs to become more permeable.
Germany demonstrates one way of doing that. China’s industry-education initiatives demonstrate another. Neither needs to be copied exactly for the underlying lesson to travel. Employers cannot remain customers standing at the end of the education pipeline complaining about the product. They need to help build the pipeline.
Four Things We Could Change
The first change is simple: give students meaningful exposure to work before graduation. Internships and apprenticeships should become central parts of more educational programs rather than optional additions available primarily to students with the right connections.
Second, restore technical and vocational education to equal dignity. A society that needs skilled technicians while treating technical education as second class has created its own labor shortage.
Third, make curricula more responsive without turning universities into corporate training centers. Employers, professional bodies and educators should regularly compare what is being taught with what occupations actually require.
Finally, build lifelong education systems. The OECD’s skills-first work emphasizes modular learning, micro-credentials, recognition of prior learning and better ways of communicating skills to employers. Those ideas matter because workers increasingly need to move in and out of education throughout their careers.
The four-year degree cannot remain our only serious unit of educational currency.
This Is Bigger Than Kenya, and Bigger Than Gen Z
Stolen Youth began with Kenya because Kenya provides a powerful window into what happens when a young, ambitious and increasingly educated generation confronts institutions and an economy that do not always meet its expectations. But the more I researched Gen Z, the harder it became to pretend that the underlying tensions stopped at Kenya’s borders. They do not.
The scale changes. The economics change. The institutions change. A graduate in Philadelphia faces circumstances different from one in Nairobi, Berlin or Beijing. But the structural question travels remarkably well.
What happens when education raises expectations faster than labor markets can satisfy them?
What happens when employers change their requirements faster than universities change their curricula?
And what happens when young people discover that the bargain they were offered no longer works quite as advertised?
The ILO’s numbers show just how global the problem has become. Young people are more educated, yet educational mismatch is increasing, and the organization warns that economic transformation has often proceeded too slowly to create enough high-skilled jobs for growing numbers of graduates. That is the structural deficit we need to fix.
Gen Z does not need another lecture about working harder. Most young people already understand that nothing comes easily. What they need is an education system, an employer community and a labor market that are finally designed to speak to one another. We spent decades telling young people to prepare themselves for the future. Perhaps it is time we made sure the future is prepared for them.
Patrick Machayo is a retired U.S. Army officer, public policy analyst and author of Stolen Youth: How Kenya’s Young Are Reclaiming Their Future.