ANKARA — Twenty-five-year-old Fatih, a graduate of economics from Istanbul’s Marmara University, remains jobless despite his degree from the respected college and several internships at corporate businesses during his studies. Like hundreds of thousands of other university graduates in Turkey, he is grappling with an uncertain future in a country mired in economic turmoil, which the COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened.

Fatih says long working hours and low salaries have led him to quit the jobs he landed after graduation, and his search for a new one has proved equally disappointing. “I’m looking for a job, but reluctantly. [Employers] are offering terms incompatible with human dignity,” he told Al-Monitor. “I’m currently designing websites for friends to make a living. If an opportunity emerges, I’d like to build my future in Europe or the United States,” he said.

The problem of youth unemployment is increasingly ossifying in Turkey and, unless urgent measures are taken, the country risks major problems of social cohesion down the road as the psychosocial well-being of young people decline amid material hardship and despair. Essentially, Turkey needs to rethink how abreast its young people are of 21st-century professional skills instead of imbuing them with a false sense of employment guarantee in the form of degrees from universities of dubious academic credentials, which have mushroomed in recent years.

The most recent figures by the Turkish Statistical Institute show that the jobless rate in the 15-24 age group has reached nearly 25%, while the overall rate stands at 12.7%. Youth unemployment is the highest among university graduates at 21% or 961,000 people, according to the Platform of the Young Unemployed. Researchers, however, estimate that the actual youth unemployment stands at about 40%, counting in those who are not actively looking for jobs out of despair and are thus excluded from the official statistics.