{UAH} how can you graduate 400,000 each year when Uganda can not seat 400,000 students at O & A levels?

For the past five or so years, the media in Uganda has reported that "400,000" people graduate every year from tertiary institutions/universities and they all cannot be absorbed into the job market. It's an utterly misleading statistic that people have jumped onto uncritically. Unfortunately, those who have happened to quote that figure in their News reports don't show the source in line with whose findings are those after research. The statistic has been thrown around for probably a good five years. Come to think about it: it means in just five years there are 2 million Ugandans with tertiary/university qualification! If you carefully analyzed annual university graduations since independence, you can hardly get a million graduates.

just do some quick math. For close to 30 years of independence Uganda had only one university and a handful of tertiary institutions. Until the start of private sponsored students in early 90s, Makerere graduated on average perhaps no more than 1,000 per year. Even if you exaggerated and estimated that Makerere graduated 2,000 per year, that's 60,000 in 30 years! Let's overestimate that all other tertiary institutions were producing five times the number of Makerere, that's 300,000 in 30 years. That's an estimate of 360,000 in 30 years. Assuming about 15% retired, died or left the country, you get about 300,000 in the first 30 years of Uganda's independence! Throughout the 90s we had only four universities. Makerere graduated on average about 3,000. That's 30,000 in 10 years. Let's estimate that the other three universities graduated a combined 3,000 a year, another 30,000 in 10 years, total 600,000 for all universities in the 1990s. Give other tertiary institutions 20,000 a year you get 200,000 in ten years. Add these estimates, you get barely 300k for the 90s decade. For 40 years the total is roughly 600,000.
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H.OGWAPITI
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