In Jordan, approximately 91% of students complete lower secondary education, a rate higher than that published for Germany in this series. Yet the World Bank ranks the MENA region among those where the returns to education remain among the lowest in the world. The diploma is there. The elevator, however, no longer rises.
The essentials
- In Jordan, the lower secondary completion rate reaches approximately 91%, but private returns to education in the MENA region rank among the lowest in the world (World Bank). Access remains a significant issue in preschool, upper secondary education, and for refugees.
- Access is high in basic education, but remains a significant issue in preschool, upper secondary education, and for refugees. The content transmitted and its recognition in the labor market present significant challenges.
- In Jordan, a gap between qualifications, skills sought, and available jobs is documented, with no evidence that educational massification alone is the cause.
- Wasta influences access to employment, and more transparent public recruitment can reduce its effect.
- Pathways exist—skills certifications, school autonomy, institutional links with employment—but these reforms require political choices and their implementation remains uneven across MENA countries.
90% of graduates, zero wage premium
The figure is striking because it contradicts intuition. One imagines education in the MENA region as a lagging sector, with overcrowded classrooms and high dropout rates. Jordan partly invalidates this picture. Approximately 91% of students complete lower secondary education, but this figure does not mean that nine out of ten students finish the entire secondary cycle. On this quantitative indicator alone, the country compares to OECD members for lower secondary education.
A World Bank regional report indicates that private returns to education in the labor market are among the lowest in the world in MENA, presenting Jordan as an emblematic case, without specific figures for the return on the Jordanian secondary diploma alone.
The phenomenon is structural, not cyclical. Among the young university graduates studied, observable school signals may insufficiently differentiate certain skills sought by employers.
Jordanian schools teach, but do not transmit
A school system that enrolls almost all its students through secondary can produce little economic value when the content taught is inadequate, regardless of the duration of schooling.
Jordan’s PISA results fall below the OECD average in all three domains. PISA primarily compares students of equivalent age, not students at equivalent schooling levels. Students go to school. They spend the required years there. But measurable cognitive acquisitions remain well below what educational systems in East Asia or Northern Europe produce with similar durations.
Pedagogy plays a large role. Jordanian curricula prioritize memorization over problem-solving. The final assessment, the tawjihi, the end-of-secondary examination, determines access to university, but it essentially rewards the restitution of standardized content. Teachers are trained within this framework. Students adapt to it rationally.
The result can be a system that prioritizes exam success over optimizing skills transferable to employment.
The child from the right neighborhood has already won before entering the classroom: this mechanism, documented in advanced countries, also operates in Jordan, where higher-income households resort more to private tutoring. The tawjihi can favor cramming and private lessons, likely to increase inequalities, without it being established that its result can be purchased.
A labor market that turns its back on graduates
The second lock is on the employers’ side. The Jordanian economy relies on a bloated public sector, where approximately 40% of employed Jordanians work, and a private sector where informal networks play an important role, particularly in small businesses, while large businesses value qualifications more highly.
This structure creates a dissociation between the two sectors. The public sector is a major employer of Jordanians, particularly graduates, in a context of low productivity and insufficient creation of quality private jobs. The productive private sector accords partial value to diplomas as a signal of technical skills, but also seeks experience, interpersonal skills, and other information. Practices of recommendation and wasta are documented in certain Jordanian hirings, without consulted evidence regarding unpaid internships or their systematic use as a selection mechanism.
This framework particularly affects young women and youth from modest backgrounds, who have less extensive networks and cannot afford long waiting periods. The massification of secondary education aimed to reduce these inequalities.
Lessons from other regions
Jordan is not alone in this situation. Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and to a lesser extent Lebanon have followed similar trajectories: rapid massification of school access in the 1990s and 2000s, without parallel curriculum reform or links to employment. Francophone sub-Saharan Africa presents the same symptoms today at an earlier stage.
What is observed in these cases, and what the World Bank documents for MENA, is a gap between increasing enrollment and measurable cognitive acquisitions. When the proportion of graduates increases without skills progressing equivalently, the signaling value of the diploma can erode. Employers then seek other information: the network, the specific school, the recommendation. Certification becomes a necessary but insufficient entry ticket.
East Asia experienced this massification in the 1970s and 1980s, but coupled it with profound pedagogical reforms, external evaluation of schools, and structured links between businesses and technical high schools. South Korea, in particular, made its school certifications legible to employers by anchoring them in competencies defined with industry. The diploma retained its signaling value there because it designated something specific.
The question that will decide 2040
The dissociation between enrollment and mobility is not inevitable. But it requires political choices and their implementation remains uneven across MENA countries. The World Bank supports reforms concerning school governance, links with employment, and results data transparency.
The first concerns autonomy. PISA 2022 data indicate Jordanian centralization on certain curricular choices, notably the selection of educational materials. School principals have little room to adapt their practices to the local economic fabric, recruit teachers of their choice, or experiment with different pedagogical formats. Comparative PISA analyses associate school autonomy, when accompanied by quality assurance mechanisms, with better performance. Jordan is virtually absent from this.
The second node is institutional. Links between school and the labor market do not create themselves spontaneously. They require dialogue forums between Education ministries, professional chambers, and businesses, work-study programs, certifications defined in terms of competencies rather than course sequences. These mechanisms exist at embryonic stages in Jordan. They remain marginal compared to the mass of general secondary education.
The third node is epistemic. Without longitudinal data on graduate trajectories, employment rates by cohort, wage gap between graduates and non-graduates over ten years, sectors of insertion, it is more difficult to follow individual trajectories, but not impossible to measure what the system actually produces. Opacity protects the status quo. Publishing performance data by school and region would be as much a political act as a management tool.
Two trajectories are emerging by 2040. In the first, Jordan undertakes these governance and certification reforms. Schools gain autonomy, certifications become legible to employers, and results data allow gaps to be corrected. A diploma reflecting precise and measurable competencies could retain discriminating value. Intergenerational mobility rises.
In the second trajectory, enrollment continues to progress without reform. The signaling value of the diploma could erode further. Young people from modest origins, without networks to compensate, would find themselves in a worse situation than before massification, having invested time and money in a certificate without corresponding opportunities. Informal, clan-based, regional, and family networks could then resume the allocation role the diploma was meant to supplant. The social tensions observed after the 2011 Arab Spring included frustrations of young graduates facing limited job prospects.
This spring has not disappeared.
The most useful signal to observe in coming years will be the evolution of the wage gap between graduates and non-graduates in the same cohort, ten years after graduation. The wage gap between graduates and non-graduates constitutes an imperfect indicator of the diploma’s signaling value. Reforms can improve alignment between certifications and competencies, but the wage gap alone is insufficient to measure it.
AI is eliminating entry-level career positions for young graduates: this phenomenon observed in advanced economies adds an additional constraint to labor markets like Jordan’s. If entry-level positions, the first jobs that allow precisely acquiring the experience companies demand, disappear under the pressure of automation, the circle closes even tighter on young people without networks.
Available levers for reformers
Experiments exist. They are modest, but they signal what is possible.
Jordan’s National Center for Human Resource Development has launched technical training programs that combine curricula defined with employers, mandatory internships, and certifications recognized by the sectors concerned. The sectors involved—tourism, information technology, health—remain minority in the secondary landscape, but they demonstrate that another model is operational.
The World Bank has been financing school governance projects in Jordan for several years that test school autonomy and external evaluation. Results remain difficult to measure for lack of published longitudinal data, but available intermediate evaluations suggest learning gains in participating schools.
At the regional level, the United Arab Emirates have invested in skills-based certifications and partnerships with foreign universities to make their diplomas legible to international employers. The approach remains elitist, it primarily benefits the most sought-after sectors, but it demonstrates that certification anchored in measurable standards can recover signaling value.
The Jordanian question is therefore not whether reform is possible. It is who has an interest in pursuing it. Teachers who would lose protected autonomy, civil servants who have administered a centralized system for decades, universities that recruit based on the tawjihi: each of these actors has reasons to resist changes that would redistribute the power to evaluate and certify. School governance reform is always, ultimately, a political reform.
The moment that determines whether an educational system transforms massification into mobility or disappointment rarely plays out in classrooms. It plays out in budgetary arbitration, union negotiations, and decisions about what is measured and published.
Sources
- World Bank, Middle East and North Africa Economic Update, 2023
- OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Jordan results (pisa.oecd.org)
- National Center for Human Resource Development, Jordan, institutional publications
