Unemployed PhD holders cry foul over job prospects

Falah Ereini, who holds a PhD in law, plans to walk around 180km with his 12 children, from Tafileh to Amman, on Saturday to stage a sit-in near the Royal Court and draw attention to the fact that he cannot land a job at a state university in Jordan, writes Mohammed Al Raqqad for The Jordan Times.

The school teacher and father of five sons and seven daughters (aged 2-19) is the president of an association that brings together 300 Jordanian PhD holders who have not been able to find jobs at state-run universities. He says that there are 7,000 Jordanians holding a doctoral degree who are not employed, and cries foul over appointment policies in both government-run and private universities.

Official figures indicate that the number of Jordanian graduates from local universities who earned a doctoral degree from 1997 to 2017 totals 10,074. In 2017 alone, the figure was 935. In the same year, the number of academic staff with PhDs working at Jordanian universities was 8,640, including both Jordanians and non-Jordanians, according to the Department of Statistics.
Full report on The Jordan Times site