Graduating Into Nothing: PNG's University Boom Meets a Job Market That Doesn't Exist

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

This week at Sir John Guise Stadium, the University of Papua New Guinea is conferring degrees on its 71st graduating class across five days running from 27 April to 1 May. Around the country, Divine Word, Unitech, Pacific Adventist and the PNG University of Natural Resources have already capped and gowned their own cohorts over recent weeks. The robes are lifted, the photographs posted, the parents weep and then the hard truth lands. There are no jobs.

The numbers do not lie, even when ministers do. Research published through the Harvard Building State Capability programme found that of roughly 80,000 youths leaving PNG's educational institutions each year, only about ten percent find employment annually. The PNG National Research Institute has reported youth unemployment above 60 percent. Yet the World Bank's modelled ILO figure for national unemployment, a misleading 2.74 percent for 2024, captures only those actively job-hunting in a country where 85 percent of the population is rural and most adults subsist on gardening or informal hustles. The official rate is a statistical fiction. The street tells the real story.

The structural failure is laid bare in the World Bank's June 2025 PNG Economic Update and the Bank's December 2025 approval of a US$150 million budget support package. Country Director Han Fraeters was diplomatic but blunt: PNG has not been getting the returns it should from its immense resource wealth, and decades of revenue mismanagement have starved health, education and jobs. The Bank's Country Partnership Framework formally backs PNG's ambition of creating one million jobs by 2027 a slogan ministers repeat without a credible pathway. Mining and LNG dominate exports but are capital-intensive and employ almost no one. There is no manufacturing base. Agribusiness reform stalls. Foreign-exchange shortages choke importers. Power and internet remain unreliable. SMEs cannot scale. The public service is bloated and frozen.

Into this vacuum, Parliament has now inserted the Vagrancy Act 2026, passed 80–1 in March on the back of legislation introduced by NCD Governor Powes Parkop, and welcomed by Prime Minister James Marape as a step toward an orderly capital ahead of APEC 2033. Read the law, though, and a darker design appears. As Dentons special counsel Imelda Tamade told the PNG Law Society, the Act has eight provisions on dealing with vagrants but never defines "vagrancy" anywhere in the text. Police or a local authority can arrest a person on suspicion; the citizen must then prove they are not a vagrant, after which the court can issue an exclusion order returning them to their home province. There are no clear health-related exemptions, and the law sits uneasily against the Section 52 constitutional right to freedom of movement the same ground on which the 1980s version of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court.

This is a government criminalising the symptom while protecting the disease. When 80,000 graduates and school-leavers a year are pushed into a market that absorbs perhaps 8,000, the surplus does not evaporate. It migrates to the cities, sleeps in settlements, and now risks being declared a vagrant and bussed back to the village by court order. PNG is not failing its young people through misfortune. It is failing them through choice through chronic under-investment in productive sectors, through tolerance of corruption, through cosmetic legislation that mistakes urban policing for economic policy. The graduation gowns will keep coming off. The question is what, if anything, the state intends to put in their place.