Degrees Without Direction: Graduate Unemployment, Family Pressure, Identity, and Mental Wellbeing in Pakistan

Abstract

Graduate unemployment is more than a labor-market outcome in contexts where education is closely tied to mobility, adulthood, marriage, family reciprocity, and respectability. This qualitative article examines how unemployed university graduates in Pakistan interpret prolonged job searching and its effects on identity, family relationships, gendered expectations, and mental wellbeing. The study is designed around 26 semi-structured interviews and uses NVivo-assisted reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes organize the findings: the degree as a broken promise; dependent adulthood without economic autonomy; gendered deadlines and social comparison; mental wellbeing under prolonged uncertainty; and rebuilding a future. The analysis treats unemployment as a socially organized period of waithood shaped by family interdependence, stigma, class, and gender. It shows how material support can coexist with pressure and how graduates respond through reskilling, examination preparation, freelancing, faith, peer support, and migration planning. The manuscript uses synthetic composite interview excerpts as a reporting model.