Education in Tunisia is compulsory until the age of 16, and the country has long achieved near-universal access to primary education. Yet, officials at the Ministry of Education have repeated for more than ten years that nearly 100,000 students leave the system every year before completing their cycle.
This dropout figure is regularly confirmed by official sources. The Director-General of Programs mentions 110,000 withdrawals for 2014-2015; while the Tunisian Observatory of the Economy counts 91,222 dropouts in 2021-2022 (i.e., 4% of students across all levels). At a symposium held in Gafsa in November 2025, a senior inspector from the ministry recalled the figure of 300 students dropping out each day. The orders of magnitude are thus remarkably stable: between 90,000 and 110,000 annual withdrawals.
Two indicators also attest to a slow but steady deterioration. On one hand, the net enrollment rate in primary education, measured by the National Institute of Statistics, fell from 98% in 2012 to 96% in 2018, then to 92% in 2023. In the first cycle of secondary education, it no longer reaches 76% in 2023. On the other hand, the cost of failure is not only human: between 2010 and 2020, about one million grade repeats cost the state more than 350 million dinars, roughly 13% of the ministry’s budget.
Three benchmarks cited by the author
90,000 to 110,000 annual withdrawals from the education system, by year and source; 91,222 dropouts recorded for 2021-2022; 92% net enrollment rate in primary education in 2023.
A methodological clarification is in order here. The sources consulted do not provide an annual continuous and homogeneous series for 2010-2025: the definitions (withdrawals, dropouts, attrition) and the perimeters (public-only, primary and secondary, all levels) vary from one publication to another. The figures above should therefore be read as convergent references rather than as a stable and unique statistical data. If we adopt a prudent range of 90,000 to 110,000 withdrawals per year, the cumulative over the fifteen years 2011-2025 is, in rough terms, between 1.3 and 1.6 million young people. Let us emphasize: 1.5 million on the street!!!
An estimate, not an individual count
The cumulative total of 1.3 to 1.6 million over 2011-2025 is presented by the author as an order of magnitude calculated from an annual range. It does not constitute a homogeneous statistical series cataloging every student.
What do these cohorts lead to? To our knowledge, there is no continuous follow-up of youths who leave school: this in itself is a striking finding, since the system does not know what becomes of those it loses. We can nonetheless reason from the labor market. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the overall unemployment rate stood at 15.2%, the unemployment rate for ages 15-24 at 39%, and the employment rate at only 46% of the population aged 15 and over. In other words, “just over one Tunisian out of two has a job in the formal sector”!!! A young person who leaves school around 14 or 16, without a recognized qualification, faces a formal labor market that does not employ them. The most plausible interpretation, coherent with these indicators, is that they invariably join the informal economy: small trade, construction, seasonal agricultural work, occasional services, i.e., lawful activities but without protection, without a career path, nor a future. For some of them, the lack of prospects makes illicit activities attractive, from smuggling to various trafficking, which offer immediate income. This second path remains, for lack of data, a “black box” to be documented through targeted surveys; it is nonetheless suggested by the concentration of dropout in inland regions and among the most disadvantaged milieus.
The difficulty does not stop with those who drop out. Those who continue to university face another barrier. Unemployment among higher education graduates reaches 22.5% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 24% in the first quarter of 2026, with a considerable gap between men (12% to 14% depending on the quarter) and women (30% to 32%). Analyses published by the business press highlight that companies, particularly private ones, are seeking technical or professional profiles that general university programs produce little of.
The two phenomena (premature dropout, and degrees not professionally qualifying) are the two faces of a single failure of education policy: a first and second cycle unable to provide a general education to all and thus an early exit without qualifications on one side; a higher cycle that is insufficiently equipped with recognized professional training on the other.
Tunisia has neither oil rents nor mineral resources comparable to those of its neighbors; its only structural wealth is the collective intelligence of its population. Each student who drops out represents a public investment already made (years of schooling, teachers’ salaries, infrastructure) that is never “recouped,” and a productive potential that is lost to the economy. Across several cohorts, this means more than a million young people whose skills will never be mobilized. Grade repeats, which accounted for 13% of the ministry’s budget during the 2010-2020 decade, show that the state is already paying a very high price for failure: the question is, therefore, whether it is better to spend up front to achieve success rather than afterwards to observe failure.
The proposed objective is deliberately simple and measurable: that an entire generation of students reaches the baccalaureate, or, for those who do not achieve it, a recognized professional qualification. It requires an increased budgetary effort and a restructuring of the system, along four axes.
Education must be treated as a productive investment rather than a cost. The strengthening of the budget should be multi-year and targeted toward levers that impact the reduction of this dropout rate: supervision, support, equipment for schools in disadvantaged regions and populations. Part of the funding can be freed by reducing the cost of failure (grade repeats, retakes, late remediation schemes).
With 2,354,820 students spread across 90,635 classes in 2024-2025, the author estimates that an average of 20 students would require about 27,000 additional classes at constant staffing.
In France, to take just this example, the sections of higher technical studies (BTS) and the University Institutes of Technology (IUT) offer, after the baccalaureate, qualifying programs, selected for their links with companies, combining general and technical education complemented by internships or work-study. They absorb a large share of professional and technical baccalaureates and lead directly to employment, while preserving the possibility of continuing studies. Tunisia already has technological establishments, but the offer remains too narrow relative to the cohorts of baccalaureate graduates and to the unemployment rate of 22 to 24% among graduates. Developing these tracks, by building them with professional branches, simultaneously addresses two problems: it gives students a concrete horizon that encourages them to stay on until after the bac, and it provides companies with the technical profiles they say they cannot find.
Dropout is a process that begins with absenteeism, learning delays and grade repetition, long before formal dropout. It can be detected. Three measures are proposed: a unique student identifier, which the ministry has mentioned introducing, to track each student’s path and identify warning signals (absences, repeated failures); free in-school tutoring organized in the school to reduce reliance on paid private lessons that widen inequalities; and systematic follow-up of every young person who leaves the system, with a proposal for reentry. Existing initiatives, such as the Model for the Prevention of Dropout and of School Failure (M3D), launched in 2018, and the School of the Second Chance, should be evaluated and then generalized rather than left as pilots.
Available data converge: about 100,000 students leave Tunisian schools each year, and neither the formal job market nor the university, with graduate unemployment above 22%, offer them a path commensurate with the level of public investment. The very high cost of this situation is already paid, in the form of grade repeats, informal sector, unemployment and social tensions. It is time to alter this disastrous trajectory, not to say scandalous. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” (Mandela).
Hédi Sraieb, Doctor of State in Development Economics
