Beyond the Grade A: Rethinking Education and Success After Graduation

  

In the song of Bien (a Kenyan singer), entitled ‘A Student’, in the chorus he speaks the quiet truth we don’t like to put out, he says ‘Mama, I don't wanna be the A student, working for the B students Ukampania C student, in the land of the D students, Oh mama na ma E students Huku inje wanatesa na ma-Benz. Oh, you know the end justifies the means’.

In the context of the song, Bien is highlighting the irony of life after graduation. He is saying: “Out here in the real world, the ‘E’ students”those who failed or scored poorly in school “are the ones driving Mercedes-Benzes and living lavishly.” The line “Huku nje wanatesa na ma-Benz” is written in Sheng, a form of Kenyan urban slang, and roughly means, “Out here in the real world, they are flexing with Mercedes-Benzes.” It is a reminder that academic performance does not necessarily determine what happens after graduation, or guarantee a person’s economic success.

The education system we have built is not designed to fully resolve the challenges our society faces, and the champions of that education aren’t guaranteed to win the next game of getting the paper (money).

The issue of unemployment in Rwanda is one that has not been addressed in its entirety. Imagine walking into a room of ten people, all part of the workforce, ready and willing to build a career. In February 2026, at least one person in that room is completely empty-handed, actively searching for a job but unable to find one. This represents the eleven percent national unemployment rate—a figure that has stubbornly refused to budge, remaining perfectly flat compared with the exact same time last year.

But if you look more closely at the individuals in that room, the burden of this stalled economy is not shared equally. If you look at the women, the struggle intensifies; their unemployment rate climbs to nearly thirteen percent, while the men stand at just over nine percent. This leaves a stubborn three-and-a-half percent gender gap that society has failed to close over the past twelve months. Age tells a similar story. The youth, fresh-faced and eager to enter the market, find doors slammed in their faces at a rate of over thirteen percent, while older, more experienced adults face a much lower nine percent rate. Even geography plays a role, with city dwellers finding the job hunt slightly more gruelling than their rural counterparts.

However, the traditional unemployment rate only tells the story of those completely locked outside the gates. The real, underlying crisis of the labour market is revealed when we look at labour underutilisation. Step back inside that room of ten people. If we look beyond who has a job title and instead ask who is actually earning a secure, full-time living, the picture darkens dramatically. More than five of those ten people are suffering from labour underutilisation. This means over half the workforce is trapped in a grey zone—either working part-time hours when they desperately need full-time pay, or so utterly exhausted by the job hunt that they have temporarily given up looking altogether.

Worse still, this hidden crisis is actively growing. While the headline unemployment numbers suggested everything was stable, the underutilisation rate quietly surged by over two percentage points compared with last year, signalling deep economic distress. For women, this reality is staggering. Nearly two-thirds of all working-age women are underutilised, meaning that even when they do manage to find work, it is rarely enough to sustain them. Interestingly, while young people struggle more to find initial employment, this broader crisis of underutilisation hits everyone equally, leaving over fifty-five percent of both youth and adults underemployed or discouraged.

Ultimately, the narrative of February 2026 is a tale of two realities: a surface-level stability that hides a deeply fragile, unequal, and worsening job market underneath. These figures come from the 2026 Labour Force Survey of the National Institute of Statistics Rwanda.

In Rwanda, short-cycle tertiary education is estimated at 0.8%, Bachelor or equivalent at 2.8%, Master’s or equivalent at 0.4%, and Doctoral or equivalent at 0.1%. The proportion of the population aged 16-30 years who attended tertiary education in Rwanda was 2.9% in EICV7. Access to higher learning education remained more prevalent in the urban population (5.4%) than rural (1.6%). (Fifth Population and Housing Census – 2022).

The numbers raise a rather uncomfortable question: if only a small proportion of the population reaches tertiary education, what exactly are we expecting a university degree to do? Perhaps part of the problem lies in what we have come to expect education to produce. We have built a system in which success is often measured by grades, examinations and qualifications, while the ability to apply knowledge to practical problems receives less attention. The result is a student who may know how to pass the test, but not necessarily how to navigate the test that begins after graduation the test of finding opportunities, creating value and solving real-world problems.

For many young people, education has become a promise. You go to school, work hard, pass your examinations, obtain a degree, and then, somewhere at the end of that road, there is supposed to be a job waiting for you. The problem is that the economy does not necessarily make the same promise.

This is where Bien's words become more than just lyrics. The A student may have done everything that the education system told them to do. They attended class, passed examinations, obtained qualifications and perhaps even graduated with distinction. But graduation does not automatically translate into economic opportunity.

And this is not an argument against education. Far from it. Education remains one of the most important tools for individual development and national transformation. The question is whether the kind of education we provide is sufficiently connected to the kind of economy we are trying to build.

There is a difference between being educated and being economically useful.

A student can spend years becoming very good at passing examinations without necessarily becoming very good at solving problems that someone is willing to pay them to solve. That gap matters.

Perhaps this is why the conversation about unemployment among young people should not stop at the question, “How many jobs are available?” We should also be asking, “What skills are we producing, what problems need to be solved, and how well are the two connected?”

The answer is particularly important in Rwanda because access to tertiary education remains relatively limited. According to the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, only 2.8 percent of the population aged 15 years and above had attained a Bachelor's or equivalent qualification, while 0.4 percent had attained a Master's or equivalent and 0.1 percent a doctoral qualification, according to the Fifth Population and Housing Census.

In other words, having a university degree is still not the ordinary experience of the Rwandan population. Yet among those who do obtain one, there is an increasing expectation that the degree should lead somewhere.

But where?

This is where we need to rethink what we mean by success in education.

For decades, the traditional formula has been relatively straightforward: study hard, obtain good grades, get a degree, find employment. It worked for many people because the number of graduates was smaller and the economy was structured differently. But as more young people enter higher education, the degree itself becomes less of a guarantee of distinction in the labour market.

The A student is therefore entering the same labour market as the B student, the C student and sometimes even someone who never went to university. The labour market does not necessarily ask who had the highest marks. It asks what you can do.

This is where skills, creativity, entrepreneurship, professional networks, technological competence, communication and the ability to identify and solve problems become important.

The uncomfortable truth is that the classroom and the market do not always speak the same language.

A student may know the theory of accounting but not know how to build a financial model. A law graduate may know the law but not know how to advise a business. An economics graduate may understand economic theory but struggle to interpret real business data. A computer science graduate may understand programming concepts but have little experience building something that people actually need.

The problem is not that these students failed.

Sometimes, the problem is that we taught them how to answer questions rather than how to identify questions worth answering.

And perhaps this is where Rwanda's education conversation needs to go next.

The country does not only need more graduates. It needs graduates who can create value.

That value can come through employment, but it can also come through entrepreneurship, professional services, research, innovation, agriculture, technology, creative industries and other forms of economic activity. The question should not always be, “Who will employ me?” It should increasingly become, “What problem can I solve?”

This does not mean telling every unemployed graduate to become an entrepreneur. Not everyone needs to start a company, and entrepreneurship itself is not a magic solution to unemployment. A functioning economy needs teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, civil servants, researchers, technicians, farmers and many other professionals.

But it does mean that education should give people more than qualifications. It should give them the capacity to navigate an economy that may not have a conventional job waiting for them.

The February 2026 Labour Force Survey makes this distinction even more important. Rwanda's unemployment rate stood at 11 percent, but labour underutilisation was much higher, at 55.9 percent. The latter captures not only unemployment but also other forms of unmet demand for work, including time-related underemployment and people outside the labour force who have potential to work. 

That number tells us something that the unemployment rate alone cannot. Getting a job is not necessarily the same thing as getting enough work. And having a qualification is not necessarily the same thing as having economic security.

Perhaps the greatest mistake would therefore be to measure the success of education only by how many students graduate.

We should also ask what happens to them after graduation.

How many find meaningful employment? How many create businesses? How many enter professions related to their training? How many acquire practical skills after university? How many leave the country because they cannot find opportunities? How many remain employed but underutilised? And perhaps most importantly, how many are able to turn what they learned into something that creates value for themselves and for society?

These are not merely questions for universities. They are questions for government, employers, educators, parents and students themselves.

Universities cannot operate as islands disconnected from the economy. Employers cannot continuously complain that graduates lack practical skills while doing little to participate in developing those skills. Government cannot measure educational progress only by enrolment and graduation figures. And students cannot assume that a degree, by itself, is an employment contract.

The future of education must therefore be about more than producing A students.

It must be about producing people who can think, adapt, create, communicate and solve problems.

Because perhaps Bien's question is not really whether we should stop being A students.

Perhaps the real question is whether we have built an economy where the A student knows what to do after becoming one.

The A student should not have to choose between academic excellence and economic relevance.

The goal should be to build an education system where the two meet.