Students choose degrees by rumor because Pakistan has no career outcome data
Every admission season I counsel hundreds of FSc students in Rawalpindi choosing degrees on evidence like: my cousin's friend did software and now he is in Dubai; medical is respectable; CSS after any degree. Nobody — including me, their counselor — can answer basic questions with data. What do electrical engineering graduates of mid-tier universities actually earn at year three? What share of pharmacy graduates work in pharmacy? Which diplomas actually lead to Gulf jobs and at what salaries? This data exists in fragments — HEC surveys, LinkedIn profiles, degree-wise job postings — but nobody has assembled it into something a student in Rawalpindi can use the way an American student uses salary-by-major data. Even coarse, directionally-honest outcome dashboards per field and university tier would improve millions of decisions currently made on prestige folklore. Universities will resist transparency; students and parents will devour it. Build for the parents especially — they are the real decision-makers and they know it.
A high-conviction problem with strong founder-market fit signals. The combination of severe price asymmetry, accessible demographics, and existing infrastructure makes this buildable within 9 months by a small team.
Solutions · 2
Scrape and structure the outcome data that exists: job portals, LinkedIn, and HEC stats into one honest dashboard
Perfect outcome data needs surveys nobody will fund; directionally-honest data is scrapeable today. Cross-reference degree and university mentions in job postings and salary bands, LinkedIn career-path samples per program (where do NED electrical grads of 2020 actually work?), HEC enrollment against posting demand. Publish per-field dashboards with confidence caveats in plain language. Imperfect but transparent beats folklore. This is genuinely my kind of weekend data project — if two people join, we ship the first ten field dashboards within a quarter.
Alumni voice-note libraries per program: what this degree was actually like, three years out
Numbers convince parents; stories convince students. A library of five-minute voice interviews with graduates three years out — what they actually do daily, what they earn honestly, what they wish they had known — organized by degree and university tier, in Urdu, recorded through alumni offices and this platform's own network. My academy would play these in counseling sessions instantly. The dashboard project should treat this as its human layer; I will collect the first fifty interviews from our alumni myself.
Discussion
I chose marketing over accounting on the strength of one uncle's opinion at one Eid dinner. The national degree-selection algorithm is literally relatives at gatherings. Dashboards would be a civilizational upgrade.
Academy admissions: parents ask me for exactly this data weekly. I improvise answers from LinkedIn stalking. The voice-interview library in solutions would become my counseling curriculum overnight.
The painful subset: students who chose 'safe' degrees into saturated fields. Honest saturation data would redirect thousands from tomorrow's disappointments. Publish the uncomfortable numbers especially.