Turkey: Only OECD Country Where a University Degree Increases Your Risk of Unemployment

New OECD employment statistics for 2024 have intensified debate over Turkey’s higher-education system, revealing an unprecedented finding: Turkey is the only OECD member where university graduates have a higher unemployment rate than the general population.

In all other OECD economies—including Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Poland—university graduates are significantly less likely to be unemployed. But Turkey stands alone as the sole exception.

In the OECD’s comparative labor-market chart, the general unemployment rate for individuals aged 15–74 is shown in blue, while the unemployment rate for university graduates appears as red markers. In every listed country except Turkey, the red markers remain below the blue bars. In Turkey, the pattern flips: graduates experience higher unemployment than the national average.

This reversal has raised structural questions about higher-education planning, student volume, quality mismatches, and labor-market absorption capacity.

Ussal Şahbaz: “Studying at a university increases your likelihood of unemployment.”

Commenting on the OECD graph, journalist and researcher Ussal Şahbaz argued that Turkey’s problem stems from an oversupply of university graduates compared to what the economy can realistically absorb.

“If you study at a university in Turkey, your likelihood of becoming unemployed increases. This means we are producing more graduates than the labor market demands,” he wrote on social media.

Şahbaz noted that the number of university graduates has doubled over the past 15 years, while many newly established universities lack the research capacity and institutional infrastructure needed to ensure educational quality. He also highlighted that Turkey has around 80,000 professors and associate professors, claiming this expansion has not translated into stronger employment outcomes.

Vasıf İnanç Duygulu: “The real anomaly is the number of students, not the number of universities”

Responding with a detailed dataset, academic and board member of the Institute for Social Studies, Vasıf İnanç Duygulu, challenged the claim that Turkey has an excessive number of universities or academics. He argued that the real issue is the disproportionate number of students, far higher than in comparable OECD countries.

Population per university:

• Turkey: 419,000

• Germany: 182,000

• Poland: 93,000

• Italy: 208,000

• Spain: 174,000

Total number of students (2025):

• Turkey: 6.995 million (3.7 million in formal education)

• Germany: 3.4 million

• Poland: 1.355 million

• Italy: 2.217 million

• Spain: 2.371 million

Academic personnel:

• Turkey: 185,000 (1 academic per 21 students)

• Germany: 217,000 (1 per 14)

• Poland: 93,000 (1 per 13)

• Italy: 125,000 (1 per 16)

• Spain: 1 per 10.7 students

These figures show that Turkey actually has fewer academic staff per student than its peers, placing it among the weakest performers in the OECD in terms of educational capacity.

According to Duygulu, the problem lies in poor planning at the faculty and vocational-school levels, combined with excessive enrollment in open-university programs and departments with minimal admission requirements. Graduates from these programs struggle to find jobs, creating a perception that university education overall has lost value.

Duygulu also emphasized the earnings gap:
“Even the lowest-paid academic in these countries earns at least twice as much as an academic in Turkey.”

He added:
“It is not accurate to claim that Turkey has too many universities, too many academics, or excessively high academic salaries simply because open-education graduates or students admitted with very low scores struggle to find employment.”

A Structural Crisis Shaped by Scale, Not Only Quality

Experts note that Turkey’s challenge is multi-layered:

• Uncontrolled student expansion

• Lack of strategic workforce planning

• Mismatch between degrees offered and labor-market needs

• Insufficient academic staffing

• Overreliance on open-education programs

With nearly 7 million students, Turkey’s higher-education system has grown faster than its ability to maintain quality or align graduates with industry demands. As a result, Turkey is the only OECD country in which a university diploma increases the risk of unemployment, signaling an urgent need for structural reforms.