Choosing a University Programme Is Riskier Than It Used to Be

When we talk about graduate unemployment, the conversation often becomes:

"There are no jobs." "The job market is saturated." "There are too many graduates competing for too few positions."

There is certainly a supply-and-demand problem in the labour market. But underneath it sits a different problem, one that starts years earlier, at the point where an SHS graduate picks a university programme.

I've been working with high school graduates for about five years now, and this is a pattern I keep running into: bright, capable students choosing a programme for the title attached to it, with almost no idea what the actual work, or the actual job market, looks like.

The Problem Starts With How We Choose

Sometimes we don't choose careers. We choose the status associated with them.

We choose Medicine because we want to be called a doctor. We choose Engineering because of the prestige attached to being an engineer. We choose Law because of the status associated with being a lawyer. We choose Computer Science because we've heard that technology pays well.

A question raised at the Power of You Conference by Elevate Network at Anagkazo this weekend has stayed with me. Jacqueline Sarkodie asked it, essentially:

If you remove the hype, status and honour that come with your job title, would you still want to do the work? If you weren't paid very well for it, would you still want to do it?

Uncomfortable questions. But they matter, because most SHS graduates are choosing a four-year programme based on a job title, not on the actual work behind it.

The Job Title You Chose At 18 May Not Exist By 25

A programme that leads to a particular career today may still be valuable tomorrow, but the skills required to succeed in that career can look very different by the time you graduate.

What happens when the title, prestige or expected salary doesn't materialise? What happens when you discover that becoming good at the profession requires years of deliberate practice the programme never mentioned? What happens when AI changes the nature of the work? What happens when the career you imagined at 18 looks completely different at 25?

Take a Computer Engineering graduate. They chose the programme for the job title "engineer." Four years later, they spend months applying for engineering jobs and conclude "there are no jobs." But the more useful question is rarely asked earlier: what can you actually do with the skills this programme gives you?

Can you build embedded systems? Develop IoT solutions? Prototype hardware? Program microcontrollers? Automate a process for a business? Contribute to an engineering project on contract? Teach what you know? Build a portfolio that demonstrates your capability?

None of that requires waiting for a job title and a permanent position. But it does require that the programme, and the way you engaged with it, actually built those capabilities, not just the credential.

Ask A Different Question Before You Choose

This is why choosing a university programme solely because of the career it is traditionally associated with is increasingly risky in 2026.

The modern professional needs to be comfortable moving between full-time employment, freelancing, consulting, contract work, project-based engagements, entrepreneurship and remote opportunities. A programme chosen purely for its job title rarely prepares anyone for that range.

So before choosing a programme, don't just ask:

"What programme should I study?"

Ask:

"What kind of professional do I want to become?"

Then work backwards:

• What does that professional actually do?
• What problems do they solve?
• What skills do they need?
• How do they create value?
• What does the industry expect?
• What opportunities exist beyond traditional employment?
• Which programmes, experiences and additional skills can actually get me there?

It's Okay Not To Know Yet

Not every SHS graduate has an answer to "what kind of professional do I want to become?" That's fine. Eighteen is early to have that figured out, and plenty of people work it out along the way rather than before they start.

But not knowing where you want to go isn't permission to choose a random programme you aren't prepared for. There's a difference between being undecided and being careless. If you genuinely don't know yet, that just means the process above matters more, not less: explore a few spaces that pull at you, talk to people actually doing the work, test your interest against the entry requirements before you commit four years and real money to a guess.

Uncertainty is a normal starting point. An unprepared, uninformed choice isn't a substitute for figuring it out; it's just a more expensive way of staying lost.

Working Backwards, In Practice

That thinking exercise is only useful if it turns into a process. In practice, it looks something like this:

1. Look at the space you want to make impact in. Not the job title, the actual space: health, infrastructure, education, finance, climate, hardware, whatever pulls you.
2. See the possible jobs available in that space. A space rarely maps to one job title. It maps to a cluster of roles, some of which you've never heard of.
3. Work out which of them you can realistically get into. Which ones do you already meet, or can reasonably meet, the requirements for?
4. Find the university programmes that can get you there. Not the programme with the most impressive name, the ones that actually build the entry requirements and skills for those roles.
5. Weigh your opportunities. Location, the university itself, scholarships and other opportunities on offer, the quality of the faculty, and so on.

This Is About Counting The Cost

Going through that process properly does something the job-title version of programme selection never does: it makes you count the cost and know what it actually takes to be successful after school, before you've spent four years finding out the hard way.

It's the difference between spending four years on Computer Engineering because you heard about high-paying jobs in tech, and graduating disappointed because you never worked out which of those jobs you actually qualified for or wanted to do.

It's also the difference between choosing Medicine over Biomedical Engineering because of the job market, only to realise once you're in it that a day in the life of a doctor was never really what you wanted.

That is a very different way of thinking about university, and it is the conversation we need to start having with SHS graduates before they choose their programmes, not after they graduate and find the job market doesn't work the way they were told it would.