We watch departures at the airport, but the hemorrhage begins in a classroom, the day a teenager fills out their wish form.
Imagine a sixteen-year-old high school girl, brilliant in mathematics, seated at the family dining table. Her parents weigh the pros and cons. The Mathematics track opens the finest doors, but it is reputed to be demanding, and the baccalaureate remains a gamble. Beside it, other scientific tracks appear safer. She will choose the reasonable path. No one will reproach her for this choice, and yet it forms part of one of the country’s most silent talent losses.
This scene plays out every year in thousands of households, and it never makes the front page. The public debate on brain drain fixates on engineers, doctors and researchers who leave, and on ways to retain them. It is legitimate, but it amounts to watching the mouth of a river while forgetting to inspect its source. A more fundamental question remains in the shadows: how many young Tunisians reach only the scientific level that will make them, tomorrow, talents to retain?
This is precisely the question posed by a strategic note from the Arab Institute of Enterprise Leaders (IACE), entitled “The internal exodus: how Tunisia loses its scientific talents before they leave.” Based on the institute’s study devoted to the role of mathematics in the country’s development, it advances a strong idea: the first brain drain does not begin at the airport; it begins in the orientation system. Its data sketch a picture that the usual indicators have long masked.
A reassuring figure that hides a disengagement
The debate on scientific orientation rests on an aggregated indicator. The share of students enrolled in a track classified as scientific at the baccalaureate. Nearly half of the candidates are in it. One could conclude that the pool is solid. Yet this label groups together very different pathways. Experimental sciences lead mainly to the life sciences, technical sciences to industrial engineering, computer science to digital technology and programming. All count. But only one remains the great gateway to a deep mastery of mathematical reasoning: the Mathematics section.
It is this one that is collapsing. Its share among bacheliers has fallen from 18% at the beginning of the 2000s to about 6% today, a threefold drop in two decades. The students have not deserted the sciences. They have moved toward tracks perceived as less perilous, and the statistical showcase remained flattering while the backroom emptied.
At sixteen, a bet that shapes a life
